Pilla Shooting Glasses: quite possibly the best in the world | OutdoorHub (2024)

Pilla shooting glasses aren’t cheap but they may quite literally be the best shooting glasses made in the world. Used by almost every Olympic shooting champion in recent years, these high end, premium shooting glasses cost around a thousand bucks or more, but claim to offer performance and quality beyond what any other shooting glasses offer.

So what makes Pilla Shooting glasses so great? Are they really worth the money? Is their reputation well deserved, or is it just marketing hype? Let’s dig a little deeper into Pilla and figure that out.

About Pilla Sport

Pilla claims to be the best in the world when it comes to shooting glasses. Certainly the impressive number of competitive shooters who have won prestigious medals and competitions helps justify that claim. But to be the best, you have to have the best designs. Pilla works with Zeiss Optics, to create what are the most perfect lenses and frames ever designed for shooting glasses. Using cutting edge optical materials for lenses, Pilla and Zeiss create shooting glasses that use special optical finishes and coatings to filter light and offer clearer, crisper and more perfect shooting pictures. You can even get prescription shooting glasses from them!

But How Does it Work?

The old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic might apply here, except Pilla isn’t marketing their glasses as magic, but simply highly engineered. We can look at their Magneto 2 glasses for an example of that engineering. Notice the lightweight, but durable alloy used in the frames, the use of high strength magnets to hold the interchangeable lenses in place, along with the incredible assortment of lenses. And really it is these lenses that might be the heart of what makes Pilla so great. Although it is also hard to argue with high grade frames, because after all, shooter comfort is important.

It is well known that shooting glasses have to be strong enough to work as safety glasses, but also to serve to enhance your shooting ability. Shooting glasses work by using different colored lenses to filter white light. Different colored lenses will block different wavelengths, and make certain colors stand out better in certain environments. While this might sound like magic, it is really simple optical science, and also the reason Pilla offers so many different colored lenses. Not only do you need different colors for different targets, but also different weather conditions, types of targets, and even different environmental conditions (you’ll want different colors for hunting in the woods than you will for shooting clays in the desert).

What Pilla and Zeiss have done is take this basic science and fine tuned it. It’s really easy to use basic colors, and very hard (and expensive!) to refine and fine tune that concept so that you are working with colored lenses that squeeze the most performance out of a lens. This is why Pilla lenses come in so many different colors.

Human Engineering

We’ve seen that science and engineering have combined to create Pilla shooting glasses. Now it is one thing to have the best lenses, but you also need to engineer your frames to work well with the shooter. Nobody likes an uncomfortable pair of glasses, let alone elite athletes who are engaged in high stakes competition shooting. You want glasses that are comfortable, easy to wear, provide appropriate protection against impact in case of an accident, and are easily adjustable to the wearer. To that end, Pilla uses high strength lightweight alloys, and interchangeable parts like nose bridges to ensure that the wearer has the most comfortable fit possible.

Gone are the days when shooting glasses looked like regular tinted glasses. Now, Pilla builds their shooting glasses to have wrap around designs, that both better protect the eyes, and improves your performance by extending the target enhancing lenses to your peripheral vision. It all combines to be the best engineered frames and lenses ever sold in shooting glasses.

Conclusion

Pilla shooting glasses come with an eye watering price tag. You can’t just get them from common retailers, you have to go through Pilla or one of their authorized resellers. These are premium, Olympic grade shooting glasses and are sold through retail channels where the kinds of people who will drop four figures on shooting glasses shop.

If you’ve got the money and the shooting skill, or dedication to learn that skill, then you need a set of Pilla shooting glasses. Their claims of being the world’s best shooting glasses are backed up by solid scientific proof, and the skill of one of the finest optical materials companies in the world. When combined with superior frame design, and a passion to create the best possible shooting glasses, well, what more could you possibly want?