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…?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 22:36 and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.