Digital Test Charts: Worth It for Independent Practices?

A test room with a wall-mounted chart and a chin rest that the patient can't move is not a clinical decision. It's a hand-me-down from the last fit-out, never questioned since.

Most independent practices are still running test charts that were specified once, a decade ago, and never revisited. Meanwhile, the room itself — the actual physical space where the refraction happens — is one of the few parts of the patient journey that a multiple cannot template and roll out identically across 400 branches. It is also one of the few parts that an independent can genuinely make their own.

OICO's DTC-1 digital test chart is actually a useful prompt to look at that room again.

What it actually is

The DTC-1 combines a 22" HD monitor with an embedded PC and a 7" wireless tablet controller that runs over Bluetooth. No laptop balanced on a trolley. No remote you can't find in a dimmed room — the controller is backlit specifically so you can see the buttons without lighting up the test environment.

The tablet shows a thumbnail of the live chart, so the optometrist never has to turn around or glance at the wall screen mid-test—a small detail. Genuinely changes the rhythm of a refraction when you're not breaking eye contact with the patient to check what's on screen.

The chart library is the actual selling point.

A monitor is a monitor. What you can put on it is the differentiator, and this is where the DTC-1 earns the conversation. Snellen, LogMAR, Landolt C and Tumbling E for adults. A separate children's set — Kay symbols-style optotypes, numbers, HOTV and Sheridan Gardiner with a matching plate booklet. Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Hindi numeral charts for international optotypes.

Beyond acuity: contrast sensitivity, Ishihara colour vision, visual stress testing, Amsler grid, red/green duochrome, astigmatic dots, and a full phoria set — Worth four dot, horizontal and vertical OXO, Schober, cross phoria fixation. Distance is adjustable from 2m to 6m, with direct or mirrored viewing and built-in single-letter or single-line masking.

That is not a brochure list for its own sake. It is the difference between referring a patient elsewhere for a test you don't have the chart for and running it yourself in the room that afternoon.

The lens promotion angle nobody talks about

Buried in the features list: built-in promotional images for AR coating, hard coating, progressive lenses, photochromic and polarised options. That's a dispensing tool sitting inside a clinical instrument. Most practices have this conversation with a leaflet or a verbal description. Showing the actual visual effect on the same screen the patient has just been tested on is a different conversation entirely — and a more profitable one, if multiple-pair and lens-upgrade revenue matters to your practice.

What a multiple does with this and why it's different for you

A corporate chain that specifies test room equipment is solving for consistency across hundreds of sites and across a procurement department's spreadsheet. Every branch gets the same chart, the same protocol, the same twenty-minute slot. Differentiation isn't the brief. Standardisation is.

An independent specifying the same category of equipment is solving for something else: a test room that supports a longer appointment, a wider range of patients walking through one door — children, multilingual patients, people who need a contrast sensitivity or visual stress test that a high street chain won't offer — and a dispensing conversation that has time actually to happen. The DTC-1's chart range only pays for itself in a practice built to use the time it frees up. That's an independent's home ground, not a multiple's.

£720 for the unit, plus £90 if you want the wheeled monitor trolley, is a modest outlay against what a test room upgrade can do for how a practice feels and what it can offer. The real return isn't the hardware. It's whatever you build into the appointment time; the wireless tablet hands back to you.

Before you order one

• Check your VESA mount clearance — the monitor wall-mounts on a standard 75x75 VESA plate, but measure your test room wall first.
• Confirm your room's viewing distance setup against the 2m–6m scalable range, so you're not retrofitting mirrors you don't need.
• Decide who in the practice will actually use the lens-promotion images at the point of dispense — and brief them, so that part of the investment doesn't go unused.

If you're weighing up equipment investment as part of a wider plan to grow what your practice offers, that's exactly the kind of decision our Grow Independent service is designed for.

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