I bought this bag to use on city shoots as a replacement for a messenger-style bag, which although convenient, had led to a painful bout of sciatica; it turns out that carrying a heavy load with the weight unevenly distributed really isn’t good for your back.
So a backpack which distributes the weight evenly but which can be accessed quickly and easily in a similar way to a shoulder bag seemed like an ideal solution. Now that I’ve used it on a couple of real-world shoots, I’ve formed some opinions about it.
So let’s start with the good points. First, you can cram an awful lot of kit in it. On a recent trip to London, I filled it with my Nikon Z8 and two lenses, my IR-converted Fuji X-T2 with a zoom, my full collection of LEE Filters, spare batteries, cables, chargers, 16” MacBook and various spare items of clothing. And with the expandable roll top there was room for plenty more. For a bag which will supposedly fit under the seat a plane (I’ll find out if this is true next month), being able to fit the MacBook in is a real bonus.
Second, even when loaded with a large amount of kit, it’s comfortable and distributes the weight well, despite not having a waist belt. With less heavy loads, you can carry it all day without issues. Getting kit in and out is on the whole, easy enough to do without having to take the bag off your back and lay it down on the ground, as you would with a standard backpack. This makes it really suited to city work, where you find yourself wanting to access your camera a lot more often than on a landscape shoot. It’s not quite as smooth a process as with a messenger bag, but I’m willing to give up a little bit of convenience for a bag that’s not going to cause injury. Another plus point is the abundance of very useful pockets for organising memory cards, documents, batteries, meds and so on - this aspect of the bag is very well thought through.
Of course nothing is perfect and I do have a couple of gripes. First, although the camera cube is well-protected, there is no protection on the sides of the bag where you access your kit, so it’s vulnerable to bumps and knocks. This seems like a bit of a design flaw; it surely wouldn’t have been too difficult to put a thin layer of foam on the sides of the bag? I place cleaning cloths between my equipment and the side of the bag to give it a bit more protection, but this is something I feel shouldn’t really have to.
Another flaw is that kit placed at the bottom of the camera cube (when the bag is upright) is really difficult to access. I get that for reasons of structural integrity the zips couldn’t open closer to the bottom of the bag, but if the cube had about 1.5 - 2cm of padding at the bottom, kit placed in it would be situated just a little bit higher up the bag and access would be fine. I’ll probably work around this issue by putting a layer of foam between the bottom of the bag and the ICU, but it’s disappointing that this is necessary.
So overall, this is a very good bag, but with a couple of irritations.