Depth of Field and Hyperfocal Calculator

The hyperfocal distance is the focus distance that gives you the deepest possible sharp zone for a given lens and aperture: focus there, and everything from roughly half that distance to infinity is acceptably sharp. Landscape shooters use it to keep both a foreground rock and the horizon in focus. Crisp calculates it instantly for your exact camera, lens, and aperture.

Depth of field depends on four things: sensor size (via circle of confusion), focal length, aperture, and focus distance. The formulas are textbook optics, but working them at a tripod is impractical — so you enter those four values in Crisp and read the near limit, far limit, and total sharp band immediately, with the math unit-tested against published DoF tables.

The circle of confusion (CoC) is the largest blur spot that still looks sharp in the final image — it is the threshold the whole depth-of-field calculation hinges on, and it varies with sensor size. Most calculators hide the CoC they assume; Crisp shows it openly and lets you override it, so you can match a stricter standard for large prints or pixel-dense sensors.

In Crisp, that can't block you. Alongside a curated list of common bodies, you can enter a custom circle of confusion or sensor crop directly — so a just-released body, a cinema camera, or a film back works on day one. Stale camera lists are the top complaint in this category, and custom CoC entry is the structural fix.

Crisp does, completely. All math runs on the device with no network required and no ads to load, so it works at a trailhead, on a mountain ridge, or in a canyon with zero bars — which is exactly where landscape shooters need it.

An f-stop is the geometric ratio of focal length to aperture diameter; a t-stop is the measured amount of light actually transmitted through the lens, which is why cinema lenses are marked in t-stops. For depth-of-field purposes they are close cousins, and Crisp accepts t-stop entry directly so cinema shooters don't have to convert in their heads.

Yes, and macro is where generic calculators break down, because at high magnification the standard formulas need the reproduction ratio. Crisp has a dedicated macro mode where you enter the reproduction ratio, and the results stay accurate down to sub-one-foot distances with sensible units.

Yes. There is no artificial focal-length ceiling, so 500mm and 600mm birding and wildlife glass calculate correctly, including the razor-thin bands you get at close focus distances with big telephotos.

Because they compute in one unit and lazily convert for display, which produces useless readings like fractions of a foot instead of inches. Crisp treats units as a first-class feature: feet-and-inches output is real feet and inches, metric is clean meters and centimeters, and rounding stays correct below one foot.

Stopping down (a higher f-number) widens the sharp zone; opening up narrows it. But the relationship also depends on focal length and focus distance, which is why intuition fails at the edges. Crisp's live scale lets you drag the aperture and watch the band respond, and the Charts view plots depth of field against aperture for your lens so you can pick the sweet spot deliberately.

Yes. Saved kits store your bodies and lenses so a full setup comes back with one tap. If you shoot one body with three primes, each combination is a single tap away at the tripod instead of a form to re-enter.

Crisp is deliberately ad-free. Nothing floats over the readouts, nothing interrupts a calculation, and nothing needs a connection to load — the whole screen belongs to your numbers and the live focus band.