Why Renting a Camera is more beneficial than buying a new Camera? Leave a comment
In this modern world technology and gadgets plays an important role in an individual’s life. Gadgets like mobile phones, laptops, and gaming consoles have become popular among people. Everyone nowadays carries their gadgets as a part of their own.
In this new era, people are making their living with new work cultures like social media, YouTube, blogging, and cinematography. And for making their content attractive and eye-catching, every content creator wants to use new and latest equipment for their videos and content. And now this is where a camera came to work as an important part of daily lifestyle.
Now the question arises whether buying a camera is a good option or renting a camera is more preferable?
As for the fact, buying a camera is a good option if you want to stick to a particular camera or lens just for your personal use and hobby but it is quite hard for an individual to buy every lens and camera if they are using it professionally. Every new Project and shoot site needs some specific gear for the best shot and for that, you need to have every camera gear available in the market.
The camera industry changes every day, cameras with more advanced features are introduced every single day. The camera becomes outdated quickly as some new camera with more features is available next day. But can you buy every possible camera you like? What if it is more expensive than you expect? Whether buying a new camera and lenses are worth it, can you make it your return on investment from those particular gears?
All the questions and doubts have a simple and straight answer in front of you. If you are a professional and trying to make living and money out of it. You need to be an expert in handling every possible and advanced level camera and lenses. For that, you have to use that particular camera and its equipment. And affording every camera is not possible for everyone. This is where renting a camera and lenses makes it more cost-effective.
You to do a little bit of math and figure out the answer yourself please list down all the trips you’ve been to in the last two years. It could even be a weekend out or it could be a day trip birding out in Bangalore or Bombay or wherever. Now, apart from that, I’d like you to make a list of all the camera equipment that you used on all of these trips and calculate the cost of hiring camera equipment in the last two years if you had hired them or if you did hire them. Now that comes up to a particular number and now look at the cost of actually procuring this equipment if this cost of hiring it is not below 15 to 20 percent of actually obtaining this equipment or buying this equipment then it doesn’t make business sense or economical smart sense to be investing on this camera gear because it will take you nearly five to six years to break-even this cost. You know what happens in the world of cameras, in five years the camera is obsolete and it’s time for you to buy another camera so you’ll be as good as just being renting all the time. If you don’t travel 40-50 to 60 days in a year which is one-fifth of a year and you don’t use camera equipment for 50-60 days in a year you would be better off simply hiring equipment from a rental store rather than investing your hard-earned capital on investing on equipment which is not just sitting idle in your house but are also depreciating the value of a 600-millimeter lens.
Today is not the same one year later and two years later so you’re depreciating the value of this equipment in this era of all of us using these shared cars and taxis in Olas and ubers it makes no sense to own a car if you don’t use it regularly likewise the same logic with camera equipment as well if your usage is not very high you should not be investing on camera gear and making it sit in your house and not do anything and also develop fungus and for which you’ll now have to invest on more camera equipment like buying a dehumidifier to keep your camera equipment safe. So if you’re not using your camera for more than fifty days in a year let’s keep that as a thumb rule it makes no sense for you to buy the equipment you’re better off hiring it paying whatever you want and the biggest advantage of hiring it is let’s say you’re going on a mammal photography trip like let’s say to Ran tambour Ramon at photograph Tigers, you need a 400-millimeter lens for example and next month you’re going to let’s say Corbett or let’s say Pongo to make photographs of birds where 400millimeter is a little short you can be using a 600-millimeter lens. You go to Ladakh to photograph Snow Leopard you can be using an 800-millimeter lens, so don’t get married to just one lens and hire it or buy it and keep it in your house it’s a great idea to hire what you need for that particular day and that particular trip so my choice is to be able to hire equipment when you want to. Unless you know you shoot a lot and buy equipment like let’s say a 70 to 200-millimeter lens which you need for every trip in every place and you shoot more than 50-60 days a year.
So renting a camera is a better and great option than buying a camera because it gives you the flexibility to use that one camera for that particular time but it also gives you an option to switch up to something upgraded if you want.
Just Explore and Decide
