Renting gear online?

[Joe Riggs]

Hi,

i was curious if anyone has tried renting gear online from places such as (lensrentals, lens pro to go, etc...there's a bunch of them).

How was your experience?

Any advice when renting from one of these places?


Anything gotchas to watch out for?

[Seth Bloombaum]

I found lensrentals to be very straightforward to deal with, though it's been a couple years since I used them for 3 (or so) rentals. To their credit, the website is very good at making plain their terms, shipment details, options, concerns, etc.

My advice - take it slow, read everything, consider renting the gear earlier than you need it, think about what happens if your shoot goes long for some reason... really that's all stuff I'm concerened with on a local rental, not just online.

Oh, and here we are headed into the depths of winter - fedex is great until some major storm closes a hub!

[Mark Watson]

Gotchas?
Well I wanted to rent a FS700 and lens from borrowlens.com once but they wouldn't ship it to a foreign country. I think I was asking them to FedEx to Korea and I'd use it for a month and send back from Hong Kong or something like that. They wouldn't do that even though I offered to put down a deposit to cover 100% of the gear replacement cost. I'd like to try them once I'm stateside though, as they seem like a solid company to use.

Mark

[Kyle Root]

I've used both Borrowlenses.com and Lensrentals.com over the past 4 or 5 years with no issues. Great companies and the process is very easy.

[David Barnett]

I'm torn with these. On the one hand I think that the money could be put down into the lens itself, esp buying a used lens. On the other hand I feel I've worked a circle & bought a bunch of unnecessary lenses I don't need, instead of the 2 or 3 & could probably be best off with.

But I've heard from photographers borrowlenses.com is good, fwiw.

[Kyle Root]

I started off with Borrowlenses and was renting the Nikon 70-200 F2.8 VR2 back in 2011-ish because at the time, I was just kind of venturing into photography and wanted to see how much of a difference this "pro" lens that everyone uses made. Well it made a huge impact.

I still didn't have the money for it really, so I rented it again a year later, and then began saving until I could buy one for myself. Finally got one 2 years ago and LOVE it. Thanks for Borrowlenses, I spent $2,000 haha.

More recently I used Lens Rentals (because I had a 20% off coupon) to rent 2 Nikon D750s to compliment the one I already own for a wedding video shoot back in Sept. They are only 90 minutes away I found out, so if I had a real emergency, I could just drive up to Nashville and pick up what I needed, so that's comforting.

As noted, both outfits have been great, and I'd go where ever I had a discount. lol

Borrowlenses use to have a deal where they would pick like 4 items and discount all those for 7 days say, and if you rented (for anytime in the future) you got that special rate, which was really cool and how I rented the 70-200 back in the day.

I don't see it on there now, but they do have a black Friday deal going on.

[Mike Watson]

I have found lensrentals to be high quality in service and gear.

Consider renting locally. Consider the fact that you are a local business, and that you are asking people to trust you rather than hire an outsider, and that you should consider doing the same whenever possible.