Tom,
One of the divisions of the company I work for commerializes professional gear for editing photo's, magzines...It's a pleasure to see how commercial leaflets can be manipulated... It can't be Nikon's purpose to convince (mislead) people that focal length plays a role in the above cases. The only thing that can happen is that some misinformed salespeople, "invented" this tale and the pictures.

Shallow DOF
 

Isn't this shallow depth of field?

http://www.24p.com/downloads/11B.jpg

Re: Shallow DOF
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Juan Trujillo : Isn't this shallow depth of field?

http://www.24p.com/downloads/11B.jpg -->>>

It is, but not in any practical sense. It's full tight, wide aperature, maybe 1 foot horizontal field of view, and the background is probably twenty feet away (the blurry background in the upper left). The camera is maybe six feet from the subject. Great for shooting insects and leaves, but pretty hard to shoot a movie this way. Try duplicating this look on a head and shoulders shot in an interior setting.

A different set of rules apply to macro photography and DOF. In some case (because of the greater image magnification) video will have less DOF than film in close up photography.