Thanks for your feedback. I plan to order a pair of bifocals in a few months."Did Zenni provide full or partial credit for those progressives when reordering as bifocals?"
Full credit minus shipping - I had to reorder another pair of glasses, but just went to previous orders and edited the type of glasses to bifocals and they shipped another pair quite quickly.
" My biggest question is how do you like bifocals as compared to progressives? Based on my initial experience I would think there is less distortion to deal with when wearing bifocals?"
I had never worn progressives before and bifocals only rarely - I found that the transition line for progressives was smack dab in the middle of my line of sight, so when I was walking around everything was blurry or I was cocking my head or moving my eyes higher up to see. With the bifocals there is a clear delineation and I'm not having to adjust my head.
I may also buy two pair of glasses - one for distance, one for close-up.
I like the bifocals much better than the progressives.
With the Zenni experience, I was spending much less than you, so was wiling to try things out (order, ship back, re-order, etc). At $600 a pop I would be a lot more demanding with regard to fixes.....
Regarding your experience with progressive lens it sounds like they were not ground correctly or not installed correctly. With my first pair when I looked down at the countertop everything was badly tilted. After remaking them, my second pair did not cause that sensation. I think my first pair had the progressive starting point cut in too tightly and not balanced between the eyes so that the otherwise normal tilting distortion started sooner on one side. While I like the remade pair of glasses ten times better, I have not worn them enough to decide if I think progressive lens are worth their drawbacks (having part of the field of vision sharper, while other parts are more blurry..though I might expect bifocals to be the same or worse in that only a section of the lens is used at a time).