It was only towards the very end of the last decade that the excimer laser was approved by the FDA for LASIK eye surgery. But within ten years there has been a whole host of companies which have jumped into the race for capturing the largest share of the very lucrative this eye surgery market. The good thing about it is that there are now companies which are ready to pump in the dollars to carry out research and bring in new advancements.

But as companies develop new models they also are more eager to push their models to the doctor and to a certain extent to the patients. This is most apparent on the internet. If anyone is considering a eye operation and thinks about reading up some literature about it on the internet, he or she is bound to be bombarded with ads by various companies trying to convince him or her that their product is the best in the market. How true are such claims? Not that much. Yes, each of the models would be different from the other in some respect, but the overall difference will at best be minor. Breakthrough innovations don't happen everyday.

So are all surgery machines safe? Well, the ones approved by FDA are. You got to know which are the various types of surgery machines that have been approved by FDA. There's a whole host of them. Of them three companies dominate a large part of the market. They are Alcon, Bausch & Lomb, and VISX. Another major player in the LASIK market is Nidek, but their Wavefront technology which helps the operation machine to ma the eye is yet to be approved by the FDA.

The main concern for most patients thinking about surgery is the 20/20 vision. Studies of different models of operations show that there are no significant differences between them. The accuracy they provide are almost similar in all the cases. So on that count all these types of lasers score the same.

Another big concern for patients undergoing this eye surgery is the quality of night vision. Some patients do complain about visual aberrations and night halos after going through a surgery. Recent studies conclude that the traditional Alcon and VISX are more effective than the new Wavefront technology causing lesser visual aberrations during night. It is also understood that of all the major players VISX performs the best when it comes to night vision.