Satisloh Launches NEO Blockless Surfacing Line at MIDO
News
Satisloh, a global leader in ophthalmic manufacturing technology, announced that its NEO Blockless Surfacing Line is now available to purchase, featuring the NEO-orbit generator & engraver and the NEO-flex polisher. Eliminating traditional blocking and delivering industrial-grade throughput with full lens compatibility, the new NEO line is transforming RX lens production. Engineered for mid- to high-volume laboratories, the two-machine system simplifies surfacing, reduces consumables and space requirements as well as waste, and maintains the precision and reliability expected from Satisloh’s proven technology.
Innovation Without Compromise: The Complete NEO Surfacing Line
NEO-orbit & NEO-flex form a system that operates together, consolidating the surfacing process to just two machines instead of seven. This approach generates superior operational benefits:
Radical Simplification: the NEO surfacing line eliminates all non-value-added steps, including taping, blocking, cooling, deblocking, detaping and alloy waste handling, drastically reducing process complexity.
Cost Savings and Sustainability: Fewer machines and process steps mean lower consumables, labor, maintenance and energy costs. It also means less energy and water consumption and less waste – specifically, no more toxic alloy.
Process Time Reduction: The streamlined workflow reduces surfacing time to just seven minutes per pair of lenses – down from over 50 minutes with an alloy surfacing line.
High Throughput: The combined system processes up to 80 lenses per hour, maintaining industrial capacity output.
Technical Breakthroughs and Competitive Advantage
The NEO surfacing system achieves its blockless precision using a patent-pending Pin Vacuum Lens Reception system in the NEO-orbit generator, ensuring maximum lens surface support without distortion.
“With the NEO surfacing line, we are giving labs a simpler and more efficient way to surface lenses,” said Jan Luckel, Head of Product management. “Eliminating blocking and all related process steps lowers consumable costs by up to 25% and reduces the surfacing lab footprint up to 60%. At the same time, it handles more than 99% of lens jobs virtually eliminating the need to route or outsource jobs to on-the-block production lines.”
Key Technical Differentiators:
Full Range Compatibility (>99%): NEO-orbit’s Pin Vacuum Lens Reception enables processing of high curves (up to 15D front / 18D back) and of blanks with rotationally symmetric AND non-rotationally symmetric front surfaces (e.g., bifocals, trifocals, front-side progressives). It can produce prism up to 10 degrees and a lens diameter range of 50-80mm.
Proven Reliability and Quality: The line is built on the robust Satisloh technologies of the ART-blocker, VFT-orbit-2i generator and the Multi-FLEX-2 polisher and uses proven Satisloh generating and polishing processes for superior lens quality.
Modular Flexibility: The two-machine architecture avoids the single-point-of-failure risk of all-in-one systems and enables flexible line balancing and scalability.
“Blockless surfacing is an important step forward for the industry, and the blockless NEO Surfacing line makes it practical at an industrial scale,” said Andy Huthoefer, VP Marketing and Product Management. “Our goal was to redesign the surfacing line in a way that reduces complexity, drastically improves efficiency, enables sustainability and frees up space, without limiting the range of lenses a lab can produce. NEO Surfacing delivers that and gives laboratories a scalable path to future growth.”
The NEO Blockless Surfacing Line is available to order now.
To see for yourself what the NEO Blockless Surfacing Line can do for you, contact the Satisloh team or book an appointment at MIDO.