Wouldn’t it be handy if the the film companies printed Depth of Field or Hyperfocal tables or charts on the cardboard boxes and cartons used for films?

Few zoom lenses have DoF info on them and hyperfocal tables don’t get seen much either, but both are useful.

There’s a good Wikipedia entry on hyperfocal calculations, and in an idle moment, I made the table below in Excel with the formula:

H = f^2 / Nc

H is hyperfocal distance
f is focal length
N is f-number
c is the circle of confusion limit; I used 0.033 for 35mm film

There’s a very good online tool to create the tables at johnhendry.com. Anyone out there think it’s a missed opportunity by manufacturers…?  Pay a tiny bit more for some more information?  Altruistic reasons for educating the masses…?

Always wondered but never found out?….what’s with the squares? Wonder no more! Thanks to www.Laiblin.de.

If, like me, you frequently rate HP5+ at ISO800 you can scrape off the square “2″ on the coding so the camera automatically rates it 800 and not 400. This will work for any native ISO400 film of course. It gives you some extra freedom with cameras that don’t have a manual film speed setting.

Maybe you can start wondering why it stops at ISO5000: wouldn’t a jump to 6400 have been more useful?