Masks - Why two lenses?

    The following may be obvious to some of you but I figured this out a little while back checking out frameless masks. We're always looking for low volume without sacrificing field of view. One way of doing that is by bringing the lens closer to the face. A frameless mask achieves this well but there's a limit to how close the lens can get. Once the lens is touching the ridge of your eyebrows that's it. At that point to further increase the sideways field of view it becomes necessary to make the lens wider so the mask becomes wider. Once it becomes wider you're starting to increase internal volume again.


    The other way of increasing sideways field of view would be a rounded lens that curves around the eyes. But this would be much more expensive to manufacture than flat little pieces of tempered glass, I don't think anyone has done it. I then thought that a curved lens mask would be the ultimate mask when it occurred to me that a similar effect is achieved by separating the lens into two parts and angling them away from the middle mimicking a curve. Now you've gained sideways field of view without increasing volume.

    good can Dan, that makes a lot of sense.


    I wonder how much this creates a warping of the image. I am sure it is there, but do we perceive it or does our pecortex just adjust the image to make more sense to us.

    i like to spear fish

    I understand what you mean. But that also will change the skirt and not to many faces will fit it. That is one reason the masks got straight build ups. Becasue a wider face can fit in using the long skirt at the sides. if you notice in some masks, The skirt start straight and then extend outwards to make the skirt fit those big faces like me without reaching the hair line. Skinny guys that have narrow faces. I mean at the eye level. ( temples)Spelling sorry. A mask with an angle will not have enough flexible rubber at the skirt touching that area creating a possible problem. We all know that the rubber start from the frame a little thick and not to flexible, geeting flexier and thinner all to the end, that is the reason for it. and to make it more comfortable.


    And i do beleive a round mirror. will be expensive because of the warping effect so a special mirror has to be use increasing the value of the mask by a lot, and i do beleive that a mask with curve mirros existed before, I will try to find the name for it .. When i was working as a SCUBA instructor i got to test hundreds of masks from a lot of different brands, the result always was the same , the mirror was not the problem, it was the rubber what makes the difference, either for spearfishing or SCUBA, I use low volumes for both anyways, but i look for the most comfortable rubber/skirt there is that fit my face. I tested OMER, Riffe, Beuchat, TUSA, SCUBAPRO,Oceanic, Technisub and more, My favorite is a TEchnisub i have here, that gives me the best of both worlds. and use them for both SCUBA and Hunting, Low volume, very soft rubber, and very hard durable plastic rounding the lenses.

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