Lensrentals

Lensrentals

Founded in 2007 by Roger Cicala, Lensrentals began as a small operation renting camera lenses from a single location in Memphis, Tennessee. Cicala, an ophthalmologist with a deep technical interest in optics, built the business to solve a practical problem for photographers: access to expensive glass without the purchase commitment. Over the ensuing decade, the company scaled into the largest online photo and cinema equipment rental platform in the United States, shipping gear nationally. Lensrentals' inventory spans still-photography lenses, high-end cinema lenses, camera bodies, lighting, and audio equipment from manufacturers including Canon, Sony, Arri, and RED. The firm does not operate as a rental intermediary through a peer-to-peer marketplace; it owns its entire inventory outright. Rental terms range from a few days to several months, and the company also offers a used-equipment sales channel for decommissioned inventory. Confirmed operational capabilities include a dedicated in-house repair and maintenance facility and a published optical testing blog that details lens performance metrics — variance, sharpness, and decentering — using proprietary optical bench equipment. As a privately held company, Lensrentals does not publicly disclose headcount or revenue. The company operates nationally from its Memphis fulfillment center. In 2017, Lensrentals acquired the assets of BorrowLenses, a competing rental platform, consolidating its position in the US market (per TechCrunch, 2017). This transaction effectively removed its largest direct competitor and added BorrowLenses' inventory and customer base into the Lensrentals operational footprint. Lensrentals is structurally distinct in the equipment-rental industry because of its self-imposed role as a de facto optics testing lab. The company publishes its lens-variance data under the banner of the Lensrentals Blog, a widely cited resource among cinematographers and photographers. This disclosure practice — publishing failure rates and optical bench test results for specific lens models — creates a market-information function that is separate from the pure rental transaction. No other major rental house maintains a comparable published-teardown or MTF-bench-testing program, making the equipment-rental firm an unconventional arbiter of lens quality for an industry that relies on its data to make six-figure cinema-lens purchase decisions.