Lens Rentals
Glass is half this building: Cooke, Zeiss, Angenieux, Canon, Sigma, vintage primes with character and modern zooms without excuses, spherical and anamorphic, PL to E-mount. Every lens is projected and inspected between rentals at our NYC, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh shops. Filters, diopters, and the matte boxes that hold them live here too.
Civilians dismissed. The rest of this page is a love letter to a search engine.
Renting Cinema Glass: a Field Guide
Cameras come and go with firmware cycles. Lenses are the long game, which is why the lens wall is where our regulars spend most of their prep time. A few honest answers to the questions we hear weekly.
Prime or zoom?
Primes for control and look: faster stops, cleaner rendering, and the discipline of choosing a focal length on purpose. Zooms for speed and coverage: documentary days, run-and-gun, event work, or any set where moving the camera beats swapping glass. Plenty of jobs carry a three-prime set plus one zoom and never feel under-equipped.
What lens mount do I need?
Whatever your camera body takes, and that answer is less fixed than it sounds. Cinema bodies mostly speak PL or LPL. Sony documentary bodies take E-mount natively and PL with an adapter we’ll include. Mirrorless mounts adapt to almost anything older. Tell us the body and we ship the right mount or adapter, checked on an actual camera, not assumed from a chart.
Spherical or anamorphic?
Spherical is the default: sharper, lighter, friendlier to small crews and tight schedules. Anamorphic buys you the oval bokeh, the flares, and the widescreen feel, at the cost of weight, slower stops, and more careful focus work. Check sensor coverage before you fall in love; a set that covers Super 35 won’t necessarily cover your full-frame body.
How much does it cost to rent cinema lenses?
Single primes run $40 to $150 a day. Pro zooms sit between $100 and $300. Matched prime sets start around $250 a day and climb past $2,000 for top-shelf anamorphics, like our Cooke Anamorphic/i five-lens set. Filters and diopters add a few dollars each and save reshoots that cost a few thousand.
How we prep glass, and why it matters
Every lens that comes back goes on the projector. We check focus scales against witness marks, look for haze and fungus with a flashlight the way techs have for decades, and clean rear elements that renters never think about but sensors always notice. Filter threads and fronts get measured so the matte box and filter kit on your order actually fits. If you want to test before you commit, come project glass in our prep room; bring your own camera body or rent one of ours. The whole wall is browsable in the lens catalog, and a quote request with your camera and dates gets answered by a person who pulls focus on weekends.