The lenses
The frame is the part with a past. The lens is the part you look through every day, so we did not economise on it. Every pair is fitted with a Barberini lens, and there are two to choose from.
The maker
Pietro Barberini started making optical glass in 1963. Sixty years on, the company still controls the whole chain, from raw material to finished lens.
Almost every lens on the market is bought in part-made and finished elsewhere. Barberini run their own furnaces, make their own polarising film and apply their own coatings, with the lens plants in Abruzzo. It is why the same factory ends up supplying the glass in Ray-Ban and Persol. It is a small industry and they sit at the top of it.
Lens one
Platinum Glass
Mineral glass, and the name is literal. The molten oxides are refined through a column of pure platinum before the glass is ever formed. Light passes through the result with less dispersion than through any plastic lens made, which is the whole reason to carry the extra weight.
- Clarity
- The measure is the Abbe value, which describes how much a lens splits light into its colours on the way through. Mineral glass sits at the top of that scale and plastic does not. In practice fine detail holds its edge instead of fraying into colour at the corner of your eye.
- Scratch resistance
- The glass is chemically tempered, which leaves the surface under compression and very hard to mark. Sand, keys and the bottom of a kit bag do not scuff it the way they scuffed the lenses you have thrown away before, and it holds its optical properties for as long as you keep it.
- Polarisation
- The filter passes only vertically oriented light, which takes out up to 99.9% of the glare bouncing off water, a wet road, snow or a car bonnet. That is Barberini's own figure. What you notice is the squinting stopping, and a long day out being less tiring than it used to be.
- Ultraviolet
- Full protection from ultraviolet, which is the part of sunlight that does the lasting damage and the part you cannot feel doing it.
- Colour
- Rare earth elements and lanthanides go into the melt itself, not onto the surface. They filter selected frequencies and work, in Barberini's phrase, as a chromatic equaliser: the muddy band between colours comes out, so greens, reds and blues separate instead of running together.
- Weight
- Glass is heavier than plastic and there is no way around it. If you want the optics, this is what you pay for them. On a frame this light it is less of a penalty than it sounds.
Lens two
NXT
NXT is built on Trivex, and Trivex was not invented for eyewear. Barberini describe it as a material developed for military aviation: it began as helicopter windscreens and fighter canopies, where something that shatters is worse than nothing at all.
- Impact
- It was engineered to take a high-velocity strike and stay in one piece. A stone off a front wheel, a dropped pair on a pontoon, a rogue ball on the ninth: none of it is an event.
- Clarity
- The usual complaint about plastic is the faint colour fringing at the edge of your vision. Trivex carries an Abbe value of about 45, the highest of any lightweight lens material and roughly half again what polycarbonate manages. Barberini put it plainly: optical clarity like glass.
- Chemical resistance
- Sunscreen, sweat and insect repellent craze cheap polycarbonate into a web of fine cracks. NXT is chemically resistant and shrugs all of it off.
- Weight
- Trivex is the least dense lens material made, a little over 1.1 against roughly 2.5 for mineral glass. The same lens in NXT weighs less than half what it weighs in glass. Five minutes after you put them on you have forgotten they are there.
- No internal stress
- Ordinary plastic lenses hold stress from being injection moulded, which shows as faint rainbow patterning against a screen, a windscreen or a bright sky. Trivex is cast rather than moulded and carries almost none of it, so the view is even from one edge to the other.
- Contrast
- Barberini's Kolor Up treatment works as an equaliser for light: it lifts colour contrast and depth perception while taking the edge off excessive brightness. It is made for sport, where the thing you need to see is often the same colour as what is behind it.
Side by side
The short version
| Property | Platinum Glass | NXT |
|---|---|---|
| Material | Mineral glass | Trivex |
| Optical clarity | The best there is | Close to glass |
| Scratch resistance | Chemically tempered, very high | Good, with an anti-scratch treatment |
| Impact resistance | Hardened, but it is still glass | Built for military aviation |
| Weight | Roughly 2.5 g/cm³ | Roughly 1.1 g/cm³ |
| Ultraviolet | Full protection | Full protection |
| Suits | Long days, hard light, keeping for years | Racing, riding, anything with a crash in it |
If you want the best optics money can buy, take the Platinum Glass. If you want a lens that comes close and is very hard to break, take the NXT. Both are made by Barberini and fitted to the same frame in the same workshop in Northern Italy.