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Gimbal hire in London: the same RS 4 Pro costs £55 or £120
The spread is huge on handheld gimbals and almost nothing on professional ones, so the cheaper the gimbal the more it pays to ring round.
By Picturental · · 6 min read
A DJI RS 4 Pro Combo is £55 a day at one London rental house and £120 at another. The same gimbal, 2.18 times the price.
Now the same comparison on a DJI Ronin 2: £330 at one house, £325 at another. Within 2%.
That is the interesting part. The spread on gimbal hire in London is enormous at the handheld end and almost nothing at the professional end, and knowing which end you are standing at is worth more than knowing any individual rate.
The rates, across three houses
All checked on 3 October 2026.
| Gimbal | Wex Rental | Media Dog Hire | Shoot Blue |
|---|---|---|---|
| DJI RSC 2 | £30 | — | — |
| DJI RS 3 Pro | £45 | £110 | £80 |
| DJI RS 4 Pro Combo | £55 | £120 | — |
| DJI RS 5 Combo | — | £125 | — |
| DJI Ronin 2 | — | £325 | £330 |
| DJI Ronin 4D 6K | — | £595 | — |
| Freefly Movi Pro Ignite | — | £225 | — |
| Easyrig Vario 6 | — | £225 | — |
Wex states plainly that "all prices exclude damage waiver and VAT", and adds 10% in the basket unless you show your own insurance, so its £55 RS 4 Pro is £72.60 all in for a renter with no policy. Shoot Blue shows £330 alongside £396, which is exactly VAT, so its figures are ex-VAT too. Media Dog's page does not say either way, which on a £120 item is a £24 question.
The pattern, and the most likely reason for it
Look down the handheld rows and it is not one model being priced oddly. Media Dog is roughly 2.2 to 2.4 times Wex on every DJI handheld they both carry. That is a house-level difference, not a product one.
Then look at the Ronin 2, where two houses land within a fiver of each other.
The obvious inference — and it is an inference, not something either company has said — is that these are different customers. A Ronin 2 goes out to people who hire gimbals for a living, know what the thing costs and will ring three places. An RS 4 Pro goes out to a much wider group, many of whom are hiring their first gimbal, booking it alongside a camera, and have no reference price in their head at all.
Whatever the cause, the practical rule follows from the table: the cheaper the gimbal, the more it pays to shop around, which is the opposite of how most people allocate their effort. On a five-day week an RS 4 Pro is £275 at one house and £600 at the other, and that £325 difference is larger than most of the lines it sits next to on a budget.
The number on the spec sheet is not the number you need
The other way a gimbal booking goes wrong has nothing to do with price.
DJI rates the RS 4 Pro at a tested payload of 4.5kg, and rates the older RS 3 Pro at exactly the same 4.5kg. People book against that figure, and the figure is honest. It is just not measuring what a working build weighs.
A camera body and a lens is not a build. A build is a body, a lens, a matte box, a follow focus motor, a monitor, a battery plate and the cage holding it together, and those add up faster than anyone expects. Reviewers testing the RS 4 Pro with a mirrorless body, a 24-70 f/2.8, a follow focus and a V-mount plate have reported rigs around 4.3kg — inside the rating, but needing the tilt arm at full extension to balance, with nothing left for a longer lens.
Put a 70-200 and a matte box on the front and you are past it.
This is the question to answer before you choose between a £55 handheld and a £325 Ronin 2: not what your camera weighs, but what the whole rig weighs with the accessories the shot actually needs. If the honest answer is near 4.5kg, the handheld is the wrong booking regardless of what it costs, and the day you discover that is the day you are standing on location with a gimbal that will not balance.
Two things in that table that are not gimbals
The DJI Ronin 4D at £595 is the most expensive line, and it is not a stabiliser you put your camera on. It is a camera with the stabiliser built in, which is why it costs nearly twice a Ronin 2. Worth knowing if you searched for it expecting to mount your own body.
The Easyrig Vario 6 at £225 is not a gimbal at all. It is a support vest that takes the weight of a camera off the operator's arms, rated 4 to 17kg, and for a lot of handheld work it is the better answer to "this is too heavy to hold all day" than any amount of motorised stabilisation. It is the same money as a Movi Pro and a third of a Ronin 2 week, and it solves a different half of the problem.
A gimbal removes shake. An Easyrig removes fatigue. Plenty of shoots book the first when they needed the second.
What is listed here
Nothing, in this category. Picturental's catalogue currently runs to lenses, cameras, a couple of lights and a handful of support items, and the stabilisers section is empty — so every figure above comes from a rental house, as it did for lighting and sound.
On the arithmetic, a handheld gimbal is a reasonable thing to own and hire out: an RS 4 Pro costs well under two thousand pounds new and hires for somewhere between £55 and £120, which is a faster return than most camera bodies. The honest caveat is that it is also the category where the hire rate is least settled, so an owner setting a price has a genuinely wide range to pick from and little to anchor on.
If you are costing a shoot rather than listing one, what a London day actually comes to puts the gimbal line next to everything else.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to hire a gimbal in London?
Between £30 and £125 a day for a handheld DJI, depending heavily on which house you ask: an RS 4 Pro Combo is £55 at Wex Rental and £120 at Media Dog Hire. A professional Ronin 2 is around £325 to £330, and prices for that model are consistent across houses. Most of these figures exclude VAT, and Wex adds a 10% damage waiver unless you show your own insurance.
Why is the same gimbal twice the price at different rental houses?
It is a house-level difference rather than a model one: on the DJI handhelds carried by both, one house runs roughly 2.2 to 2.4 times the other. The likely explanation is the customer rather than the kit, since professional gimbals go to people who know the market and compare, while handhelds often go to first-time hirers with no reference price. On a five-day hire the gap is £325.
What payload gimbal do I need?
More than your camera and lens weigh. DJI rates the RS 4 Pro and RS 3 Pro at a tested payload of 4.5kg, but a working build adds a matte box, follow focus, monitor, battery plate and cage. Rigs around 4.3kg have been reported to balance only with the tilt arm fully extended, so if your build is near the rating, step up to a larger gimbal rather than hoping.
Is a DJI Ronin 4D a gimbal?
Not in the sense of something you mount your own camera on. It is a camera with integrated stabilisation, which is why it hires at £595 a day against £325 for a Ronin 2 — you are hiring the camera as well as the stabiliser.
Do I need a gimbal or an Easyrig?
They solve different problems. A gimbal removes shake; an Easyrig takes the weight off the operator so they can hold a heavy camera all day. An Easyrig Vario 6 is £225 a day and handles 4 to 17kg. If the complaint on the last shoot was tired arms rather than wobbly footage, the vest is the right booking.