This manuscript investigates the impact of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their cameras’ key specifications on the efficiency of infrastructure visual inspections using UAVs. The challenges of UAV-based inspection data collection include reducing necessary waypoints to improve inspection efficiency while collecting desired data for sure. Existing studies generally concentrated on optimizing the efficiency of UAVs’ inspection trajectories and waypoints when equipment is given. However, the impacts of equipment specifications and their selections have not been investigated, yet they also significantly affect inspection efficiency. This manuscript surveys the key specifications of current equipment available for inspection and investigates the variation in efficiency through inspection simulations with different equipment specification combinations. Simulation results reveal that with the highest pose accuracy achievable by existing UAV platforms, it is possible to achieve efficient inspection. However, such high pose accuracy may be difficult to achieve, underscoring the importance of targeted selection of camera focal lengths according to UAV specifications and the types of pose errors. Additionally, using higher-resolution cameras may substantially improve the efficiency of high-resolution data collection tasks, which is a more practical solution for enhancing efficiency than further improvements in UAV pose accuracy. The conclusions drawn from this research provide actionable guidelines for equipment selection and development and lay the foundations of efficiency modeling, ultimately contributing to the advancement of UAV-based inspection methodologies.