In a recent paper by Narasimhanetal. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am.79, 382–385 (1986)] a method is proposed for the determination of object range distance for planar holographic systems by phase unwrapping the spectral distribution along the major axes. In this letter, an alternative approach is introduced to improve the range distance estimation process. This technique simplifies the procedure by utilizing the Fourier transformation symmetry properties associated with the real object distribution and propagation transfer function. The computation complexity can be significantly reduced because of the elimination of the complicated computing and phase unwrapping steps. In addition, the accuracy of the distance estimation is improved by using the complete two‐dimensional spectral distribution instead of only the variation along the axes.