Most depth of field calculators ask you for a number. Focal length, aperture, distance, done. Which is fine until you are standing there wondering what your 200-600mm actually does at 600mm with a teleconverter on an APS-C body, and suddenly you are doing three conversions in your head before you can even type the numbers in.
We Rebuilt Our Depth of Field Calculator - Now It Knows Your Actual Lens
So we rebuilt ours. The Depth of Field Calculator now works from your real gear instead of abstract numbers, and it does considerably more than it did when we first launched it back in January 2025 .
Pick your camera, pick your lens
Start typing a camera and it pulls from our database of over 1,300 bodies, then sets the circle of confusion for that exact sensor automatically. Start typing a lens and it searches more than 2,300 of them, and if you have already chosen a camera it only offers lenses in that mount, so you are not scrolling past every Fujifilm option while shooting Sony.
Depiction of DoF
Choosing a lens fills in the focal length and clamps the aperture to what that lens can actually do. Pick the Sony FE 200-600mm F5.6-6.3 G OSS and it starts you at 600mm, sets f/6.3, and will not let you ask for f/1.8 on a lens that has never seen f/1.8 in its life. It even accounts for the variable aperture, so it knows you get f/5.6 at the wide end and f/6.3 once you are racked out to 600mm.
Teleconverter support, finally
This is the one I wanted most. Add a 1.4x or a 2x, from a list of real converters that match your mount, and the calculator handles the whole chain: the new effective focal length, the aperture you lose, and what that does to your focus zone.
Depth of Field with Sony A7R V and Sony FE 200-600mm at 600mm at F6.3 is 0.14m at 12m Subject Distance
Put a 1.4x behind the 200-600 on a Sony A7R V and it tells you that you are shooting 840mm at f/8.8, costing one stop of light. Then it shows you the part people forget: at 12 metres your depth of field drops from about 14cm to about 10cm. A converter does not just cost you light, it makes an already thin focus zone thinner. If you are weighing one up, our full list of Sony FE teleconverter compatible lenses is worth a look first.
How blurry will the background actually be?
Depth of field tells you what is sharp. It does not tell you what most people are really asking, which is how much the background melts. So there is now an optional background distance field, and the calculator works out how far a background point spreads on your sensor and translates it into plain language, from "barely any background blur" up to "very strongly blurred, the background melts away".
Depth of Field Calculations Screenshot
The full frame equivalent trap
Here is something that trips up almost everybody, including me while we were testing this.
Put the same focal length on a smaller sensor and the calculator will show you less depth of field, not more. That looks wrong, because we all learned that small sensors give you more depth of field. Both things are true, they just answer different questions. The familiar rule applies at the same framing . At the same focal length a smaller sensor is enlarged more to reach the same print size, so the same blur becomes more visible, and it crops tighter so you are not even taking the same photo.
At f/2.8 and 3 metres, a full frame camera at 50mm gives about 58cm of depth of field. A Micro Four Thirds camera framed the same way, at 25mm, gives about 1.2 metres. Same aperture, same subject, roughly double the depth of field. Compare framing, not focal length.
The calculator now shows the full frame equivalent focal length for whatever body you pick, and there is a "Pin this setup" button that lets you park one combination and compare a second one against it, with a match framing toggle that does the conversion for you.
Everything else that changed
A plain English answer at the top, so you get a sentence rather than seven numbers to interpret.Shareable links. Every setting lives in the URL, so you can send someone your exact setup instead of describing it.Save as image , handy for forum posts or just keeping a note of what worked.A depth of field table across every aperture at your chosen focal length and distance, which prints nicely if you like something in the bag.Quick scenarios for bird in flight, portrait, landscape, macro and astro, so you are not starting from a blank form.Circle of confusion standard is now selectable, for anyone who prefers the stricter Zeiss d/1730 over the usual d/1500.It remembers your last setup , so your camera is still there next time.
One honest note
While rebuilding this we found a bug in the old version worth owning up to. When you picked a camera by model, the calculation was quietly falling back to a full frame circle of confusion regardless of what you chose. On full frame it barely mattered. On Micro Four Thirds it overstated depth of field by roughly double.
That is fixed, and the numbers now line up with reality. As a sanity check, the bird photo further down that page was shot at 600mm and f/6.3 at 12 metres, and the caption has always said 0.14m of depth of field. The rebuilt calculator returns 0.138m for that setup. Good to see the maths agree with the field.
Go and break it
It is live now at cameradecision.com/DofCalculator , free, no sign up. Punch in your own kit and see what your favourite lens is really giving you at the distances you actually shoot. If something looks wrong or a lens is missing, tell me, that feedback is how this thing got better in the first place.
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Written by Mel Adali
I have been shooting birds and wildlife in North Carolina since 2014, mostly with Sony bodies and long telephoto glass. I built and maintain the Camera Decision database, so the specs and comparisons here come from data I curate myself rather than copied press releases.
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