Top Rented Photo and Video Products of 2023

Around this time every year, we page through our rental data for the year and find the most popularly rented gear for the calendar year. As one of the largest rental houses in the world, we think it provides some good insight into the industry, and what to look forward to in the coming years’ trends in photography and videography equipment. This year had a lot of interesting statistics and trends, as most of the industry has migrated over to mirrorless platforms. We have a lot of data to go over, so let’s look at the most popular gear from 2023.

Retaining the crown from last year, the Canon R5 is still our most popular rental in 2023. But while we can go through and look at some of the highlights, let’s also post our most popular gear list for 2022, so we can see what changed.

Between the two, we can see some pretty big changes in the gear lineup from last year, and this year. 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.

How we determine these top twenty lists each year is by revenue, so by that nature, top rentals are always skewed – since it would take a $40K camera far fewer rentals to climb the ranks than a $600 camera. So for this year, we decided to also include a list of the most rented gear for 2023 – despite the list being a little less interesting.

While we can’t share the number of rentals for each of these products, we can show you the most rented gear, and say that each of these products is in the thousands of rentals – meaning we rent several of these products each day. As we’ve said in previous years, our most rented products are always the most practical – batteries and memory cards. While they’re getting better, mirrorless cameras still don’t have the battery life of a DSLR, so it’s typically recommended to have at least one additional battery if you’re renting a camera. And when the batteries can be rented for a couple additional dollars, we end up renting out a lot of spare batteries with our orders.

But now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive further into the stats, and look at camera brand market shares. This data was pulled from our rentals to determine which camera & lens brands are the most rented in our inventory. So let’s look at what the numbers have to say.

On the camera rentals, we have Canon leading the race – but Sony significantly closing the gap to make the race neck and neck. When comparing the numbers to last year’s numbers, you can really see the gain in ground Sony has done on Canon. Perhaps more surprising is the fall off Blackmagic has had on the list – which is less surprising when you realize they haven’t had any significant releases for the year until a month or so ago. With the latest release of the Blackmagic Cinema 6K, we suspect they’ll gain some ground next year and bounce back well. The numbers are pretty explanatory otherwise, so let’s look at the Lens Brand’s market share.

On the lens side of things, Canon maintains its significant lead over the competition, which is not surprising, as Canon EF (and now RF) has managed to staple itself as an industry standard in the videography market. Additional surprises in this data are Zeiss’ significant fall and Tamron’s rise. But with the transition to mirrorless platforms, our lens lineups have gotten pretty convoluted, so let’s look at rentals based on lens mount, to see which lens mount is performing the best.

As you can see, Canon EF is finally losing ground as Canon’s RF comes in to replace it. This transition has allowed Sony E to top the list of lens mounts – though I suspect Canon’s RF will retake the top space next year – as they’ve had the most aggressive lens development cycle. Other changes continue to show the transition to mirrorless as Nikon’s F mount falls in rentals, while Nikon Z significantly jumps in orders. Fuji has also gained some ground (though we don’t have GF and X-series lenses in their own category, so it’s hard to tell which platform is doing the best of the two). And finally, while the L-mount is gaining ground, it still has a long way to go before it becomes a universally accepted mount as they planned on their release.

So this concludes our look into the stats for 2023. Did any of these numbers surprise you? Feel free to chime in in the comments below. And stay tuned, as we’ll have a second article next week – where we look at new products, and the staff picks their favorites for the year.

Author: Zach Sutton

I’m Zach and I’m the editor and a frequent writer here at Lensrentals.com. I’m also a commercial beauty photographer in Los Angeles, CA, and offer educational workshops on photography and lighting all over North America.

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