The conditions for making a single-exposure recording of the hologram
of a focused image of an amplitude scatterer using the Gabor system ar
e analyzed in the FresneI approximation. It is shown that, when the di
ffraction field is spatially filtered in the plane of the hologram on
the optical axis, an interference pattern that characterizes the axial
wave aberrations of a lens or objective is formed in the far field of
diffraction. (C) 1998 The Optical Society of America.