All I wanted to do was get rid of my glasses, but when my local laser eye surgery clinic recommended some odd-sounding, advanced Presbyond treatment developed by Zeiss, I said sure, if that's what the cool kids are getting. Here's what's happened.
Editor's note: Readers often ask us for follow-ups on memorable stories. What has happened to this story over the years? This article was originally published in 2023 but has been re-edited and updated with new information, current as of May 13, 2026. Enjoy!
I'm sharing my experience for a few reasons: firstly, I'm a big experience-sharer from way back. It's kinda what I do.
Secondly, while Presbyond appears to have been around since at least as far back as 2013, I'd never heard of it.
And thirdly, I went looking for reviews that weren't posted on the same websites that were trying to sell it to me, and didn't find many. You're welcome!
So what is Presbyond, and how's it different from Lasik?
Laser eye surgery is designed to reshape the bumps on the front of your otherwise pretty spherical eyeballs. These bumps, known as corneas, play a key role in determining how light passing through your iris and lens finds its focal point. If your cornea's a bit too flat, the light focuses behind your retina, and boom, you're long-sighted. If your cornea has too much of a bump, the image focuses before it gets to your retina, and you're short-sighted.
Laser eye surgery uses largely automated machinery to cut little flaps in the outer skin of your eyeball. It then performs a laser ablation treatment on the tissue of the cornea, blasting away tiny bits to create a new shape, precisely tailored to perfectly correct your vision.
Presbyond takes things a step further.
As we age, the lenses in our eyes gradually become harder to squish into different shapes. As a result, it starts becoming more and more of an effort to read, even if your distance vision is perfect. My grandad used to hold books well down below his waist and tell me he was reading with his balls, but he was funny like that.
If you're a glasses wearer, you might choose to have two sets of glasses at this point: one for distance and one for reading. Or you might go for a bifocal or multifocal set of glasses that correct your vision in different ways, depending on where you're looking. If you get your eyes laser-corrected for distance vision, you'll probably need reading glasses again at some point.
Presbyond uses regular laser eye surgery machinery and techniques, but it's designed to correct your eyes to two different focal lengths. Your dominant eye is corrected to be great — but not perfect — for distance, and your non-dominant eye is corrected to be great — but not perfect — for reading.
These not-quite-perfections are designed to give you a fairly broad intermediate area where both eyes can deliver detail. Zeiss calls this the "blend zone."
Your brain, the specialist told me, just figures it out, and you end up with excellent all-around vision that'll have you reading restaurant menus in your 90s and seeing just fine at a distance as well. If you don't like it, they told me, you can get it fixed back to double-distance vision for free. It sounded weird and interesting, so I went for it.
The Presbyond operation: An icky but fascinating experience
The surgery was over and done with in less than 10 minutes, I'd guess. Skip ahead if you don't want gory details, but I found it fascinating. If you want extra gory details, there are plenty of videos on YouTube showing the entire process, live and close up.
One eye at a time is held open, Clockwork Orange-style, and you lie down under the first machine, which is lowered down, snug. You're told to look into a light and hold your eye still for about 7-8 seconds. If you can't, it doesn't matter; the machine is tracking your eye and adjusting its aim a thousand times a second, and will shut down if you freak out and look too far away.
I felt something as it cut the flaps into my eyes, but it wasn't painful. Friends told me to expect the smell of chicken, but sadly, that did not eventuate.
Then the surgeon, ever-so-gently, folded those flaps back, and the world went very blurry.
At this point, it's off to the laser ablation machine and the most unpleasant part of this whole affair. Again, your job is to fixate on a point, only now you can't see clearly because there's no front on your eyeball, and it's hard to stay locked on thanks to a disco array of bright, red points around your visual field. This time, it takes closer to 30 seconds each side, and apart from the discomforting glare, there's really not much to feel.
Once that's done, the surgeon smooths the flap back down over your eyeball, with the delicate touch of somebody trying to put a screen protector on a new phone without any bubbles. You know when he's got it, because at that instant the world snaps into sharp focus.
That's it, you're in and out shockingly quickly, and then off into a darkened room to get some eye drops and dorky sunnies. The small text on my phone looked absolutely crystal clear pretty much immediately, but distance was more confusing. Don't plan too much for the rest of that first day; the next few hours, you're going to want to be in bed, because your eyes really don't want to be open.
Initial results
By the next morning, my eyes felt a little extra sensitive to light, but the sunnies took care of that, and the post-surgical ache and dryness went away over the following days. By that afternoon, I was comfortable enough to drive. Within a week, I became highly proficient at doing eye drops.
Vision-wise, my reading capability is extraordinary to me. At my day-one checkup, I could read 4-point text on a card without straining. I could've done smaller, but they didn't have anything in a finer font. Closing my reading eye, I was able to read three lines better than 20/20 on an eye chart with my distance eye.
Two weeks after surgery, my eyes were still on the dry side, requiring eye drops, but that went away eventually. My eyes have felt normal ever since – minus the headaches I used to get from trying to read my phone in bed.
Over the first few months, I noticed that things weren't 100% clear in my distance vision. Street signs and number plates on cars still looked too blurry to read beyond about 30 meters (100 ft) away. My computer screen, which is in the "blend zone," took a few seconds to adjust to each day, and it never looked perfectly sharp and clear to my pixel-peeping photographer's eye, but it's still very readable at most distances without eye strain.
The adjustments between different lighting conditions, and going from looking at close things to far ones, took a minute; things looked blurry for a bit, and then they just didn't anymore. It wasn't really a conscious process. And at nighttime, bright lights like streetlamps and oncoming headlights were noticeably glary, with some haloing around them.
All this, the specialist told me, is fully expected as the brain learns to adjust. By my last review session, the transitions between different environments were getting quicker and more natural by the day.
Update: Three years post-Presbyond
Now, I'm three years beyond Presbyond and... I rarely think about it unless somebody asks. Which they do, quite a bit, because it's such a weird idea and such a confronting choice to be given.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now say I think it was a great decision – but not one without drawbacks.
I know what ultra-clear, perfect, young-eyeballs-or-brand-new-glasses vision looks like, and let me be clear: this ain't that. It's definitely a compromise. If ultimate visual fidelity is your #1 priority, then you'll probably want to get both eyes lasered for distance, and stay on the glasses train for close-up work.
But if, like me, you're primarily motivated by how much you hate your glasses, Presbyond might well be a very acceptable compromise.
Things do sometimes look a little glary at night. I still can't read street signs until I've nearly driven past them. And when I decide to be aware of it, the letters on my extremely sharp MacBook screen aren't perfectly distinct.
But the whole world still looks a ton sharper than it did before, since the moment those flaps went back on my eyeballs. There were definitely moments when my vision through glasses was sharper – but that'd only be the moments immediately after I cleaned the damn things, and before they got smudged up, sweated on, hugged against my face, or fingered. The operation has been a huge improvement.
And let's not forget the other factors; glasses restrict your peripheral vision. That tunnel vision is gone, along with the tenderness around my ears and nose bridge when I finally took the glasses off at night. Weirdly, I feel sure I can see colors more brightly and vividly; that's beautiful. Watching TV was almost overwhelming for a while there, like a massive sugar hit of color and light. I get why the kids are so obsessed with that stupid box now.
In summary, I've had no complications. The surgery was over extremely quickly, with discomfort but no pain. The recovery was painful, but short and quickly forgotten. The two-different-focal-points approach seems to be working, with an associated bump in quality of life and general happiness about things.
And while it's a compromise, it's a compromise I believe will age well. That's what really sold me on the idea in the first place; you'll have solid reading and distance vision 'til you're 90. You can always go back to a set of glasses if you need perfect vision for driving or reading, but I haven't bothered, and I suspect you won't either.
All in all, I'd say I heartily recommend it if you're a suitable candidate.
But I'd also say this: Presbyond cost me AU$6,500 (US$4,350) here in Australia, at 2023 rates, so it ain't cheap. I'm not going to shout out the clinic that did the work here – they were terrific, I have no complaints, but since most of the hard work is done by automated machines, I suspect one machine will probably do the job more or less as well as another.
Source: Presbyond
A version of this article was originally published in 2023.
