I converted myself to auto lenses quite a while back and boy they are not all created equal. Because of certain types of work I have had to do I take the vision stuff very seriously, but hey if you weld for a living your vision is your life....you can weld in a wheelchair but there are no blind welders. I have had very few issues with standard glass filters but with auto lenses I have had many failures over multiple brands/models. Optrel builds top notch stuff and you will be hard pressed to find anything more reliable or better in quality. Having said that the longest I have had any auto lens last is 3 years and that was a $400 lens. They do not like cold, they do not like impacts. Larry is spot on in saying they do protect you from UV even shut off, BUT if they are not working right they can absolutely strain your eyes to a bad point. Like others said, got to the eye doc and let em have a look. Your eyes are more important then any other equipment you have, take care of em.
Just for info these lenses work by "crystals" flipping orientation (90-180 degrees?) with input of voltage through the liquid media. Variable shade filters use a selection of doped crystals that flip at various voltages/current levels to achieve the lighter or darker shade. THANKS NASA. So the actual bad light filter is already there whether it is turned on or not, we cannot even see UV anyway....I could stand in a room with 10000 watts of no light other then uv and I would think I was in a dark room. All any SHADE of welding filter is really doing is just making it comfortable for your particular level of acceptable visible light to look at with out any strain or discomfort. Yes I just had to put that wives tale bs welder talk crap to rest....all the filters protect you from radiation damage...the rest is just muscle strain damage and perhaps some temporary stress on the rods and cones at the back of your eyeball. For giggles I submit the following by others if your so inclined.
Auto-darkening filters utilize a shutter type of LCD to decrease light penetration when energized. All electronic welding filters exhibit a characteristic known as “angle dependency”. This characteristic may make the lens appear to be darker in the center and lighter toward the outer edges or when the lens is viewed at an angle not perpendicular to the filter’s surface or not perpendicular to the arc.
Angle Dependency
If you look at a passive filter at an angle, it becomes darker as you are looking through a thicker cross section. An auto-darkening filter is a completely different animal. It appears to be lighter if you look through it at an angle. The technical term that describes this observation is angle dependency. We like to describe this observation as the venetian blind effect. When you close a venetian blind it reduces the light coming through the window, but if you look through the blinds at an angle parallel to the blinds it appears lighter. This same thing occurs in an auto-darkening filter, as they are similar in function. The liquid crystal in the LCD has elongated molecules that lay parallel to each other (see Figure 1). As they rotate to a closed position, when energized, the amount of light that passes through the filter is reduced (see figure 2). When you look through the filter at 90 degrees to the filter surface, you will experience the darkest shade. If viewed at an angle less than 90 degrees the shading appears lighter. You are experiencing the venetian blind effect otherwise known as angle dependency.
The better filters, I.E. higher quality ones, reduce this "angle dependency" effect in mho. The best ones shade very evenly which means they are a much higher density, if you will pixel count, then the bargain filters. I quickly return or toss one that filters even slightly unevenly because I know in the end I will have headaches and throbbing eyeballs. They are improving and I think optrel is leading the way in this. I just purchased a single shade arc one for my stick hood and so far it is much better then my last two miller lenses. Hell I still got a couple of AO cool blues in the toolbox.....
Looks good Tommy! 
