Lensrentals publishes rental statistics for 2017

In their blog they break down their rental statistics for the year, and it certainly seems at least for rentals Nikon has fallen behind Sony.

However, I do wonder how much of that is curiosity renting.  For instance, a Nikon user renting a Sony just to try it out would sqew statistics.

It makes sense to use lensrentals or another equivalent source to "try instead of buy".

From their blog;

As you could guess if you’ve seen this type of data in the past, a lot of our gear rented is more practical than anything else. Not much has changed from previous years, with the 24-70mm and 70-200mm’s of the world taking the cake as the most popular gear for the year. And the margins are pretty significant. While I can’t divulge actual sales numbers, I can say that the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L II and Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II out rented every other lens three times over, and are our two most popular items by a significant margin. Another surprise is that the Canon 5d Mark III is still renting at the same level as the Canon 5d Mark IV, proving once again that cameras from nearly 6 years ago are still incredibly capable machines. Finally, Sony out rented Nikon this year and is slowly closing the gap to Canon.

While Sony may be slowly closing the gap, as noted the 24-70, 70-200 was rented out over three times as much as the next popular lens, showing that gap is pretty large between Canon and Sony as far as rentings (even with the above mentioned hypothesis).