Oakley Aftermarket Lenses?

[Sander7721]

Hey people I am wantimg maybe to get some aftermarket lenses for my Sutro's anyone know of any good aftermarket replacements point me in the right direction please!

[Sander7721]

This is WW no one with advice or an opinion
Have ordered some lenses from ebay from Polar Lens for £19.99 so will see how it goes!

[MichaelK]

Call me a simp, but I've been on a lot of Oakley training and drunk enough koolaid to believe all of the marketing and most importantly safety hype.

You only get one set of eyes, I'd much rather trust official Oakley lenses than some aliexpress knockoffs tbh.

[mvnsnd]

A quick search brings up these places. I have not used them, but have ordered direct from Oakley for other glasses.

https://seekoptics.com/products/seek-op ... 8467014715

https://www.revantoptics.com/products/o ... 3732070477

[Sander7721]

Some fair points on marketing/saftey but there are reputable companies selling lenses with plenty of feed back.

Thanks for the links!

[FIJIGabe]

I've bought several different brands of lenses for my Oakleys. I'm currently using Walleva on my Flak Jackets with no issues, whatsoever. I do have a set of original lenses on my Radarlock's, but the finish is already starting to wear, and I will likely replace them with something else.

[EtoDemerzel]

It's actually cheaper to buy Oakley Prizm lenses.
I bought others like Seek, etc. and you end up having lenses you never use because the Oakley are so optically superior.
Even clear lenses, the cheap lenses simply do not have the optical clarity of Oakleys.
I don't know why but they all look cheaper than Oakleys too.

[TobinHatesYou]

I've crashed face-first with Oakleys on and that pretty much saved my eyes because the lenses only got marred and didn't shatter. Most third-party lenses have some level of refractive distortion as well, especially when looking anywhere other than dead center.

[kervelo]

Agree with @TobinHatesYou.

[Flasher]

You understand that Oakley are now just another brand in the portfolio of Italian mega eyewear company Luxotica, I'm sure that the lenses conform to international standards, but doubt that they are any better than that, no matter what the marketing may say.

[Tifosiphil]

This is WW no one with advice or an opinion
Have ordered some lenses from ebay from Polar Lens for £19.99 so will see how it goes!

I ended up with a set of these and they worked perfectly fine for my needs. My dog managed to put a hole in the original lens by running round with them in his mouth so I'm not sure I trust the shotgun blurb above!

Having used a couple of sets of Prizm and the older polarized lens I do think they are superior but at sometimes 4 or 5x the price I don't get the benefit out of them as I use them so regularly the lens gets scratched up within a year anyway. The replacement lens for my Frogskins is actually far superior to the original Oakley lens and have lasted 4x as long

[pushpush]

I like my Sutros a lot but recently I bought a couple of pairs of the SCVCN/Kapvoe from Aliexpress. They were $3 each.

Are they as nice as the $150 Oakleys? No, but they are close.

Optical clarity is just fine. Frames fit well and feel good. The photochromic response is good, albeit too slow for rapid changes while trail riding. I'll keep them in the rotation for use on cloudy/mixed lighting days. The UV blocking reflective lens that looks like an Oakley was also nice but I sacrificed it for an impact test.

It is too soon to tell if they will hold up and last as long as my Oakleys have. I'm on my third sutro lens in the original frames.

Are they as safe? I smashed one of them with a hammer on my workbench and the lens cracked but did not shatter. It was a HARD impact. I'm not sure that this is equivalent to a small stone at 50mph, but I'm reasonably confident the plastic isn't going to shatter into a bunch of tiny pieces. --- I don't have the nerve to try smashing an $80 Oakley lens so I can't say how they compare beyond the Oakley marketing materials.

I can't help but feel like $80 for a lens is absurd.

[EtoDemerzel]

You understand that Oakley are now just another brand in the portfolio of Italian mega eyewear company Luxotica, I'm sure that the lenses conform to international standards, but doubt that they are any better than that, no matter what the marketing may say.

Luxottica owns most of the US market. That doesn't mean the lenses are the same with every brand. Ray Bans and Oakleys are very different and seperate companies.

I have several aftermarket replacement lenses. If they were as good, I would say so. They just aren't.

Oakley uses purified polycarbonate, patented, that is optically like glass. Besides the coatings, that's why they look so optically perfect. I have to believe that patent ran out by now but I don't see any others with this level of clarity.

The ones I got from Seek and others are Z87.1 safety rated. Most everything polycarbonate is, even $5 safety glasses. But I would never wear anything that did not explicitly state it passed Z87.1 bc that means it did not.

@pushpush hit the lens with a point load. Cycling, you're far more likely to be hit with a pellet impact than a large blunt impact like a hammer.

There are no "international standards" in optics that lenses need to conform to besides safety ratings if marketed as safety glasses.

The replacement aftermarket lenses are pretty cheap. So, it's not a big stretch to try some. I really don't care but sharing my experience.

All I'm saying is if I did it all over, I would just save the money and get genuine lenses because all the aftermarket ones just sit unused. Oakley has sales a few times a year, you can get lenses cheap sometimes just sign up to get notified. Sutros for example were pretty cheap around $50.

[pushpush]

I agree about impacts. See my previous comment about a small stone at 50mph. Maybe I'll do some experiments with a pellet gun. That's something fun to do.

[Flasher]

You understand that Oakley are now just another brand in the portfolio of Italian mega eyewear company Luxotica, I'm sure that the lenses conform to international standards, but doubt that they are any better than that, no matter what the marketing may say.

Luxottica owns most of the US market. That doesn't mean the lenses are the same with every brand. Ray Bans and Oakleys are very different and seperate companies.

I have several aftermarket replacement lenses. If they were as good, I would say so. They just aren't.

Oakley uses purified polycarbonate, patented, that is optically like glass. Besides the coatings, that's why they look so optically perfect. I have to believe that patent ran out by now but I don't see any others with this level of clarity.

Luxottica control most of the worldwide market, not just the US, if you think that there's something special about Oakley lenses in 2024 then knock yourself out.

I have sunglasses from Oakley, POC, Smith and others and none of them have any optical aberration that I can tell (20/20 vision), but by far the easiest scratched are the Oakleys!