Canon Once Again Dominates the List of the Most Rented Gear of the Year
Every year, Lensrentals publishes a list of the most popular photo and video gear and Canon remains at the top.
It is historically very difficult to get detailed sales numbers from the largest retailers in the United States — that information is often kept behind closed doors, which is the opposite of how the information is treated in Japan. While rentals won’t provide the same information as sales, they do provide some level of insight into what equipment is popular in a given year since many will rent a camera to test it out for a few hundred dollars before they might throw down the thousands of dollars it takes to actually buy one.
Last year the most rented piece of equipment from the country’s biggest rental house was the Canon EOS R5 and the turning of a new calendar year didn’t change that: it is still the most popular piece of camera equipment Lensrentals sent out the door. Given how many new cameras have come to market in the last two years that compete directly against the R5, its continued dominance here is somewhat unexpected.
Lensrentals points out that while the top dog didn’t change, there were some pretty big shifts across the whole top 20 list.
“Perhaps most surprising is that the Canon R6 has fallen in the ranks pretty considerably, but the Canon R6 Mark II didn’t fill the void left. Additionally, RED fell off of the top 20 list, as more budget cinema cameras like the Sony FX6 and Canon C70 found their places in the top ten,” the company notes.
Considering how performant the R6 Mark II is, the fact it hasn’t even appeared in Lensrentals’ top 20 most rented pieces of equipment while the first-generation model still ranks at number 11 is perplexing.
Further, even though 2023 saw the Nikon Z8 come to market and the Z9 has been available for some time — and the Z8 was PetaPixel‘s camera of the year — neither broke into the list either last year or in 2023. In fact, not a single piece of Nikon equipment even made the top 20. That doesn’t come as a surprise after looking at the most popular equipment of the year by lens mount: Nikon’s Z-mount only made up 3.5% of all lens rentals and Nikon carries just 5.59% of all rentals across brands, inclusive of F-mount.
Looking at the most popular gear rented over 2023, it becomes clear that Lensrentals’ customers are primarily interested in shooting video — at least if they’re not shooting Canon. In 2023, only Sony and Canon products were listed in the top 20 but almost all of the cameras from the former are video-centric. The a7S III, FX6, and FX3 were the most popular cameras from Sony at fourth, fifth, and 13th on the list, but the a7 IV did squeak in at number 18. Otherwise, lenses for these two systems filled out the majority of the remainder.
Curiously, the Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR still ranks very highly and was the 14th most rented piece of equipment in 2023.
Overall, Canon makes up 37.61% of rentals while Sony follows at 20.47%. Everyone else is in the single digits. Lensrentals’ whole blog post is filled with a lot of fascinating data and is worth a look.
