20/20 correction

Revision as of 20:08, 15 June 2020 by Divenal (talk | contribs) (tighten up on defns of acuity)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

20/20 correction is a correction you normally get from a licensed optician, which corrects your eyesight up to a degree of visual acuity that an emmetropic (or "normal-seeing") person achieves on a Snellen Chart. The visual acuity is defined as the distance (usually 20ft or 6m but can be less), divided by the letter size, expressed as the distance at which the letter subtends an angle of 5 arc-minutes. (Or as multiples of the height at which the letter subtends 5 arc-minutes at a distance of 1.) (5 arc-minutes just means 5/60 of a degree.) So

  • 20/20 means 5 arc-minutes at 20 feet
  • 20/16 means 4 arc-minutes at 20 feet
  • 6/12 means 10 arc-minutes at 6m

If you can see 20/15 or even better, this means that your are overcorrected. (It is not necessarily considered super-human actuity, but it is unnecessary to correct to this level.)

It is very difficult to perform Active Focus at this strength of glasses, as there is not enough of a blur horizon to produce stimulus - see Distance vision.

See also

20/x vision

References