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Optical store featured on TV
By Karl Henkel
BOARDMAN
The folks at “Moving America Forward” didn’t have to take a second look before deciding to profile Boardman-based Central Optical Inc. in its latest show taping.
Coincidentally, the Central Optical product featured in Friday’s show — razor-sharp free-form spectacle lenses — doesn’t require a second look, either.
“It’s the greatest advancement in our industry in 50 years,” said Lloyd Yazbek, owner of Central Optical. “[Free-form lenses] can expand a person’s viewing range by 30 percent with no distortion.”
“Moving America Forward,” produced by Malibu, Calif.-based MAF Productions, is a TV-news-style program that highlights entrepreneurs and their products.
Free-form is an ophthalmic term to describe the process of forming the back surface of a lens. Normal lenses are formed only from the front side of the lens and often are used for specific purposes, such as seeing long distances or reading.
But free-form lenses allow for expanded viewing at all levels — for reading, to improve eyesight at intermediate range and to be able to see long distances.
This means a person with glasses no longer needs to point his or her nose in the direction they wish to look.
“It’s a ‘wow’ factor,” Yazbek said.
Free-form lenses surfaced in Europe in the late 1990s and first caught on in the United States during the mid-2000s.
It was March 2005 that Yazbek was on a flight to New York with Dr. Robert Gerberry, a partner with locally based Eye Care Associates Inc., when Dr. Gerberry first informed him of the new technology.
“He told me, ‘I believe this is the future,’” Yazbek said.
Gerberry lauded the technology.
“You can go from 2 feet away to infinity,” Gerberry said. “The lens allows you to pick up different areas of focus.”
After two years of research, Yazbek began the process of investing in the necessary equipment.
He soon realized he was in small company.
“There were few manufacturers that got involved due to the cost of equipment and software,” Yazbek said.
But that didn’t deter Yazbek, who by early 2012 will have invested $5 million in equipment related to free-form lenses.
Central Optical, 6981 Southern Blvd., still is one of just two companies between Chicago and New York that manufacture free-form lenses — it delivers throughout most states along the East Coast — which has meant big business for him and his 70 employees.
The decade-old company produces about 1,000 pairs — or 2,000 lenses — a day.
Demand for the free-form lenses has grown exponentially in the past few years, Yazbek said. They now make up about 18 percent of all lens production, a substantial accomplishment considering most people under 40 likely have no need for free-form lenses.
Yazbek said the free-form lenses take a few extra days to perfect — each lens is specially cut, which allows Central Optical to fit a lens to any spectacle frame — and the price for lenses should continue to decrease and align themselves with traditional lenses.
“People will wait seven days for dry cleaning, to get a suit fitted or for their hair cutter to set in,” he said. “As we get into the third and fourth generations and we get more proficient at it, the cost will be about the same [as traditional lenses].”
Central Optical’s appearance on “Moving America Forward” takes place at 9 a.m. Friday on YouToo TV, available locally to those with Time Warner service (Channel 115).