I'm considering purchasing a Nikon Coolpix 990 to shoot closeup product photography. Wonderful things have been said about the 990's macro mode, but what is the depth of field possible? Ideally I'd like to maintain sharp focus from about 3" to infinity.

With SLRs it's easy enough to flood the scene with light, stop the lens down as far as it will go and lengthen the exposure. My concern with the 990 is that all the lens elements will hamper it's ability to maintain sharpness at close distances with good depth of field.

-Brian Williams

-- Brian M. Williams (brian_williams@email.mot.com), March 24, 2000

Answers

The number of elements in a lens or its construction have nothing whatsoever to do with Depth of Field. That's purely a function of Focal length, Aperture, format and subject distance. All these things being equal, the DOF will be the same whether the lens is a piece of plastic from a disposable camera, or a 10 element zoom from Nikon, Minolta, Canon, Fuji, Zeiss or Olympus.

There have been many other postings about this subject in the past, I suggest you look further down the list.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 27, 2000.