Providing a natural 3D visualization is a major challenge in 3D display technologies. Although 3D displays with light-ray reconstruction have been demonstrated, displayable 3D scenes are selective because their depth-reconstruction range is restricted. Here, we attempt to expand the range virtually by introducing "depth-compressed expressions," in which the depth of 3D scenes are compressed or modified in the axial direction so that the appearances of depth-compressed scenes is kept natural for viewers. With a simulated system of an autostereoscopic 3D display with light-ray reconstruction, we investigated how large the depth range needed to be to show the depth-compressed scenes without inducing unnaturalness in viewers. Using a linear depthcompression method—the simplest way of depth-compression—we found that viewers did not feel unnaturalness for the depthcompressed scenes that were expressed within at most half the depth range of the originals. These results gave us a design goal in developing 3D displays for high quality 3D visualization.