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Photo : Lowepro SlingShot 100 All-Weather Digital Camera Backpack (Black) |
- Camera BagThe mderchandise was great; HOWEVER, attempts to get the rebate met in total frustration. I had the merchandise, yet I was being told my order weas not processed????? I'd sure have to be in a teriffic bind to order items this way again. I thought AMAZON was great - BUT - It does make you wonder.
Rating:
- 300AW fits Nikon D300, grip, and 70-200 VRHistory:
I own a LowePro 200AW, but when I purchased a Nikkor 70-200 VR lens I found that the 200AW could not accommodate my Nikon D300 with the lens attached.
The 300AW is considerably larger than the 200AW. It will hold a D300, attached battery grip, and attached 70-200 lens (sunshade reversed) and leave room for a flash and 3 or 4 additional lenses in the main compartment. The top compartment is large enough to hold a Gary Fong Lightsphere and a cleaning kit, leaving room for more.
Pros -
The waist strap is considerably more robust than the strap on the 200AW; it has substantial padding and is wider. This makes the bag (for me) easier to wear; tightening up the waist strap removes some of the stress the single strap places on the shoulder. Although the 300AW is larger than the 200AW it is more comfortable to wear. Wearers who find the shoulder strap an annoyance might try cinching the waist strap tighter.
The built in weather cover works well. Not, perhaps, in a full monsoon, but short of going over the falls without a barrel the bag will keep your gear safe from the elements.
Build quality is excellent, what one would expect from a LowePro bag.
Downsides -
There is no provision for carrying a monopod. I wouldn't necessarily expect a slingbag to have the capability of attaching a heavy tripod, however the 200AW can fit my monopod in a built in side strap. There is no similar strap on the 300AW. While I can cobble together a method for attaching a monopod, LowePro really should have designed in a strap. An added treat would have been a built in pocket for carrying a bottle or canteen of liquid. The waist strap makes it difficult to carry an independent canteen and carrying a bottle of liquid inside the bag with the gear is leaving the path of wisdom. (Although there is certainly room enough in the main compartment to carry a water bottle if one chooses to take the risk).
Caveats -
Capacity - the wearer should be careful when packing gear. This is a fairly large bag and it's possible to put so much gear into the thing that by the end of the day wearing the thing becomes a real trudge. Keep an eye on the total weight when packing. What seems reasonable at 6 a.m. may be torture by 6 p.m.
This design is NOT a backpack, and I wouldn't recommend it for more than a daily carry item. If I were headed into the bush for more than a day trip I would wear a backpack - the single strap design of the slingbags is, for me, not for extended carry.
The extra bulk of the 300AW makes it somewhat difficult to swing to the front, but this is more a function of body shape (mine) than bag design. The 200AW is smaller and thus easier to maneuver to the front.
If you need to carry a D300 with battery grip and 70-200 VR lens (or similar large camera body and lens), this bag will fit the gear. Recommended.
Rating:
- Good, high quality, but not perfectMy comments specifically regard the Slingshot 200, which I purchased after reading online reviews and checking it out fairly thoroughly in person. The 200 seemed like a fairly ideal bag for my needs, but actual use has revealed a few idiosyncrasies that I didn't see mentioned in other reviews that prospective purchasers might benefit from being made aware of.
First, as other reviews have mentioned, the bag appears to be top notch in terms of construction quality. The zippers all work freely with no hang-ups or catches in their travel and can be easily zipped or un-zipped with a casual tug on their pulls. There are plenty of small pockets for memory cards, cables, spare batteries and the like - as many as a semi-serious amateur like myself would hope for. The size of the bag is ideal, too, for an amateur like myself - big enough for several medium-sized lenses, the camera itself and a flash - and possibly more, although as I will point out the bag is not ideally suited to be used in that way.
The greatest benefit of the Slingshot bags, as I see it, is accessibility. I like the fact that the bag is designed to be worn on the back, making it suitable for hiking and carrying over long distances, while its design also permits it to be rotated to the wearer's front for access to its contents. Not having to put the bag down in the mud or snow to change lenses is an important benefit.
The sling design has its limitations for me, however, in that most of the time I need to access the bag it is not to access the main camera compartment, but to access other compartments in order to change lenses or add or remove an external flash unit. Unfortunately, while access to the camera compartment is easy, access to the lens compartments is a bit problematic. The zipper-limiting buckles need to be released, and they are not quite the best design - they take a little more effort than some to release, seemingly more than should be necessary, and in practice I simply leave them un-buckled most of the time. The zippers then need to be further un-zipped, probably on both sides. The lens compartments can then be accessed, but the lenses will be arranged horizontally, pointing towards the wearer's front and therefore away from him or her. That makes the lenses not easily visible and also could make them prone to falling out, requiring extra care with the bag during this part of the operation. You will need to identify the lens or accessory you're looking for, then do the three-handed remove-one-lens-and-put-on-another drill while watching that the bag itself stays in a favorable orientation, possibly requiring a fourth hand. It can be done, of course, and is probably not quite as difficult as I am making it sound, but it is not quite the ideal effortless process I'd hoped for. Sitting down makes the task easier as the bag can be rotated upwards on your lap, but if you have a good place to sit down then you have obviated part of the benefit of the bag's sling-style accessibility.
The other major flaw the bag has for my use has to do with the very large size of the main camera compartment. In order to make the bag usable for pro DSLRs, this area has to accommodate very wide, tall cameras like the Nikon D3. When it is used with a consumer-sized camera like my D90, there is a great deal of space around the camera that can not efficiently be put to use. The bag is designed to accommodate the camera in such an orientation that the camera's bottom points towards the wearer's back. There is then room for a medium sized lens, mounted on the camera, pointing to the wearer's right. A removable divider forward of the lens - further to the wearer's right - can be positioned to accommodate a lens or flash unit in "front" of the camera. (By moving this divider all the way to the right side of the bag, the compartment for the lens mounted to the camera becomes long enough to accommodate a medium sized lens, like my 16-85mm VR, with its shade fully deployed.)
I find that my D90 actually fits better in the case when I rotate it so that the camera's bottom points towards the bottom of the bag - that is, downwards when the bag is being worn. This lets the camera fit more snugly forward in its space for a better, more protective fit in the bag. This actually leaves enough space around the camera that an additional lens/flash compartment could be made to fit above the camera, and another below it. Unfortunately, the bag is not designed to be used this way and has neither the velcro surfaces nor dividers necessary to configure it in this way, causing these spaces to be effectively wasted. If the bag had been fitted with velcro and dividers that could be configured to make this space usable, it would have much more usable capacity and would meet my needs much better. Not only that, but these additional compartments would be exposed when the main camera compartment of the bag was opened, improving accessibility to two lens/flash spaces, which would also be an improvement in the design.
All the bag's lens compartments are the same depth - the depth of the bag - with no ability to configure any of them for "double-decker" lens/flash storage. While two small lenses could fit in one of these compartments, the user will have to find some method of protecting them from one another to do so. On the other hand, there is no good way to fit even one large lens, which will be an important disadvantage for some. The depth of the lens compartments is about 5", maybe stretchable to 6" or so if you're willing to put up with a tight fit. The only way to carry a lens longer than this is to put the lens in the portion of the bag designed for the camera itself and to position the camera, body-only, elsewhere. While possible, again the dividers are not configured to be used this way - they will not velcro in place in this configuration and will leave large undivided portions in other areas of the bag. I see this configuration shown in some of the product photos above. It is not ideal. It might be possible to carry a slightly larger lens - around 7" length - in the bag's top compartment, although this compartment is not well padded. You will also be giving up the bag's only suitable compartment for carrying large-ish non-camera items - a pair of gloves or a windbreaker, etc.
That large top compartment will, however, comfortably hold a D90-sized camera body with cap, which suggests another configuration for the bag. By storing the body in the top compartment, more and larger lenses could be stored in the bag's main compartment, some of which could be accessed very easily in use. You could store the camera until you reach your shooting site, choose a lens, and switch among your most-used lenses very easily while shooting. The only problem with this possibility is that - again - the main compartment is not designed to be subdivided in this way. Those lenses not stored in dedicated compartments would need to be kept in some sort of protective bag or container of their own, which you would need to fiddle with during access, and they would be free to bang around and move around inside the bag while it was being carried. Perhaps one could custom-install some additional dividers, but without velcro to attach them to in this part of the bag it would not be a trivial undertaking.
Finally, there is no good provision for attaching a tripod or monopod to the outside of the bag. It would have been easy enough to provide a couple of loop straps on the right side of the bag for this purpose, but it would probably have increased the cost and maybe would have been a somewhat awkward solution due to the bag's modest size. Nevertheless, I would have found it welcome. As it is, the bag for me is suitable strictly for occasions when additional camera support will not be required. There are three rubber loops provided on the outside of the bag for attaching additional items, and these will accommodate things that are designed to fit on a belt, such as perhaps a GPS case or cell-phone case. They are not stretchable and I don't see any way to use them to attach larger or more varied items.
The bag is a good design for somebody comfortable with these limitations and I can recommend it highly for those people. It is a fairly innovative, high quality piece of gear and may be the best solution available for those who require its features and are not bothered by its limitations.
Rating:
- Top handle tearsThe loop at the top of the pack tore while I was bringing my gear from the car to the house. Fortunately, true disaster was avoided when the camera bag with my camera landed on the car seat. This performance is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE for a backpack.
I hope the vendors performance is better when I attempt to return the product.
Rating:
- This is an excellent bag for day useI've been using this for a week now, and have been very pleased with it so far. Inside the bag, I have:
-Sony a300 with a Tamron 18-200 lens attached
-50mm fixed length lens
-2nd filter
-Remote control
-Blower
-Lens Pen
-Panoramic tripod head
The only item I was not easily able to fit was a small LED flashlight. The bag is comfortable to wear and offers great access to the camera without removing anything else.
This is an excellent bag for day trips, such as in Walt Disney World, where you can leave the majority of your gear behind and only take the essentials. Plus, it comes with a rain cover built-in, so you can feel more secure in the weather.
The strap is nice, and both it and the back are padded. There is a secondary strap to buckle in when moving to keep the pack more secure. I highly recommend this.
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