Bought On Date and other updates!

We wrote 6 weeks ago (see Quality Control Improvements) that we were not happy with just having the best quality control in the rental business— we were taking steps to upgrade even more. We’ve taken several steps since then: placing notices on lenses that tended to have higher failure rates either during use or in shipping, increased our inspection process with several new steps and tests, and tightened the age limits on our lenses.

You may have noticed we’ve sold more lenses lately than we usually do this time of year. This was to bring our lens fleet in line with our new standards: no lens older than two years or rented more than 40 weeks; no camera older than 1 year or rented more than 30 weeks. Our goal, announced in September, was to bring the average age of our lenses and cameras to 8 months by November. We’re on schedule. We’ll be selling the last of our two-year-old lenses and one-year-old cameras during our Fall Sale over the next two weeks.

We’re so proud of our rental fleet that we now are putting the age of the copy you’ve rented on your receipt: the date we bought it new, the date we last had it serviced, or the date the item was manufactured, whichever is most specific. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Another addition you’ll notice if you closely is the “Links” list just under the lens specifications on the individual items page. We’re placing link to 3rd party lens reviews, manufacturer’s specifications, accessories, and most importantly Instruction Manuals. All of our cameras, and all lenses except for Canon and some Sigmas, now have a link that will take you directly to a PDF of the instruction manual should you need it. Canon doesn’t publish PDFs of their lens manuals and Sigma doesn’t publish all of them so we’ll have to create PDFs of those manuals ourselves which will take some time.