How to – renting lenses in Poland

Sometimes, buying an expensive lens which you use only occasionally doesn’t make any sense.
For a while we were considering getting a fish-eye lens. We bought it eventually for an event, thinking of selling later, but didn’t and are in fact using it quite often.
At the same time, doing mostly landscape and food/product work, it doesn’t make sense for us to keep a long focal length, fast telephoto lens. Especially that you can easily rent it from BorrowLenses or LensProToGo if needed. Turns out, it works only in US.
This time, we are in Poland, and had to figure out how things are done here. And we came back… empty handed. Google search and browsing through number of different forums revealed, that there is no company renting Nikon or Canon lenses. Not a single one! You can rent only Sigma lenses, luckily with Nikon or Canon mounts, from Sigma Pro-Centrum. Sound good? Not at all. They have a handful of locations (8 in June 2010), and apparently no mail orders. In Warsaw and in Wroclaw, they have only Canon-mount lenses, no Nikon. I found Nikon-mount lenses in Chorzow, Poznan and Gdansk. Only one of them is within practical driving distance for me. Not only their offering seems very limited, I was stunned to find out that you need to pay 2-4,000 PLN of deposit … in cash. I think I don’t need 50-500 mm that much. My conclusion is, that although lens renting services are present in Poland, they are far from being useful and user-friendly. Yet.