Lowepro Photo Hatchback AW 22L

Concept: 4 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: Yes, it's yet another camera bag review.

The Long Version: I'm going to get this out of the way right up front – the Lowepro Photo Hatchback AW is an exceptional mixed-use camera daypack. I've owned seven different backpacks, with four currently in the rotation, and the 22L Hatchback is easily my favourite.

As a mixed-use bag the Hatchback has a large compartment to hold non-camera items, which is reached through a zippered opening across top of the bag. The secret to the bag, and the feature that gives it its name, is the body-side access panel to the camera compartment that takes up its lower half. This is basically invisible when the bag's being worn, letting the Photo Hatchback be mistaken for a basic daypack or student's book bag.

The Hatchback looks so unremarkable that it's almost remarkable. There's a fabric grab-handle on top, tall elastic water-bottle pockets on each side, and a couple of access zippers across the top and front of the bag. There's no tangle of cinch straps and clips, no lash points for MOLLE gear, no intricate panels of heavy-weight Cordura that can double as a cheese grater. It's an untechnical and unpretentious bag.

The lower compartment of the 22L Hatchback can carry a large SLR with a short lens attached. There's still room alongside for another lens and perhaps another small accessory. The 60/2.8G with its hood attached squeaks in and still leaves room for my entire three-lens Nikon V1 kit alongside it, and I can tuck the battery charger in as well. Even my F5 can fit by lying flat when it's lensless or with a 50/1.4D on it; there's still room for a decent-sized lens beside it, too. This could be an uber-stealth way to carry a full-sized SLR and separate standard zoom.

The top compartment can fit enough stuff to get me through an overnight trip somewhere. It has two internal mesh organizer pockets and a zippered nylon pocket that's big enough to hold tickets, passports, or paperback books separately and securely. There's even a keychain leash inside. The side bottle pockets are tall enough to securely hold an 800ml steel water bottle or 710ml plastic soft drink bottle, and strong enough that I'll never worry about losing what I carry. Considering that Penny's MEC Book Bag will dump her travel mug onto the sidewalk with regularity, this ability isn't something to take for granted.

An iPad-like tablet, or the svelte 11" Macbook Air, will fit in the padded slot in the Hatchback's front organizer panel. I really prefer this to the customary back-panel laptop slot because it stops the weight of the bag's contents from squeezing and damaging the laptop screen. There's also an unpadded front compartment to the organizer panel, and it has a triangular profile that makes it substantially wider at the bottom, making it very useful for longer objects that otherwise wouldn't fit inside the bag.

My day-job load is to have a camera or two, like my GA645zi, V1 system, or Ricoh GRD4 tucked into the camera compartment. My laptop, audio recorder, and its shock-mount go in the front panel, where they can be reached easily. A water bottle fits in one side pocket, and an umbrella or beverage – depending on the weather forecast – rides in the other. The top compartment can hold a light jacket when it's cold or a change of clothes when its hot, and a brown-bag lunch will fit in either the top or bottom of the bag depending on my priorities for the day.

For more serious outings this little bag will hold my D800 with 60/2.8G (or 50/1.4 if I expect it to be dark out) and Nikon V1 system, with its two zooms and fast normal lens, in the camera compartment. There's still room in there for their mutual charger or a compact camera. My audio recorder's shock mount assembly and Joby Gorillapod Focus, with its Manfrotto 484RC2 head, fit side-by-side down the front panel. Then I can either put the audio recorder and headphones into the top compartment loose – which is great for recording when I may need to move along promptly, like under a highway overpass – or use a Crumpler Haven insert to keep them organized, along with another small camera, alternative windscreen, multitool, and other bits and pieces that make up my audio kit.

Like the Flipside Sport bag that I previously reviewed, the padded camera compartment is removable, and has a built-in draw-stringed cover and handles for the occasion. (Protip: this is a great place to stash a few runs of gaffer tape.) The interior panel that divides the bag is held in place with velcro, so it can be tucked out of the way to create a single full-height compartment should the need ever arise.

As one of Lowepro's "AW" bags the Hatchback includes a cover for poor weather. I'm normally not too diligent about deploying these, but because this is a lighter-weight bag I do use it when I'm carrying my laptop. I really like the outward-facing, top-loading tablet-slash-Macbook-Air compartment, but it closes with a standard YKK zipper and has only a modest storm flap to cover it. Life's a barter.

The good news is that the AW cover is well-designed, and has loops that secure it around the shoulder straps at the top of the bag. The cut is roomy enough to fit over water bottles or similarly-sized items in the side pockets, as well. It's also handy for keeping the front of the bag clean when it's set down, as the camera compartment remains accessible. And of course when the cover's not needed it tucks into its spacious compartment at the bottom of the bag, where it provides a little extra cushion to the contents.

The fit on the 22L model is wider than I'm used to, with the straps resting toward the outside of my not-overly-broad shoulders. The sternum strap, which is removable, becomes very useful if I'm carrying a lot of weight. Otherwise I just see it as an opportunity to improve my posture, and it's a fairly easy trait to live with. There is also a removable webbing waist strap, which I immediately removed and haven't missed. While this bag can carry a lot of weight when it needs to, other bags, like as my Flipside Sport 20L, will still be filling the heavy overland hauler role for me.

Even with the large and stylishly-distressed 'LOWEPRO' running up the front of it, this bag looks like nothing. In my neighbourhood, which is on the edge of a large university, wearing this bag is the next best thing to being invisible. It's also worth pointing out that that the Hatchback is the least expensive of all of the camera backpacks I've ever owned, which makes this next bit especially telling: it and my Billingham Hadley Pro are the only camera-centric bags that I'll use even when I'm not carrying a camera.

I don't drive, so having the right bag matters a lot – I walk, at least part of the way, for everything I do. If I'm moving it means that I'm carrying everything that I need. I've spent hours sitting with the Hatchback on my lap during inter-city bus trips, have walked a couple hundred kilometres with it in the city centre, and I may have even taken it around fences and into places that I might need to depart from unexpectedly. After all that I've had no problems and no complaints. It doesn't look like much, but the Hatchback is a pretty awesome little bag.

last updated 21 may 2013

Lowepro Flipside Sport 20L

Concept: 3 out of 5
Execution: 4 out of 5
Yeah, but: It's 'Sport' in the 'SUV' sense.

The Long Version: Let's be honest – I'm something of a brand snob, and Lowepro comes across as the Targus of the camera-bag world. It's widely available, a recognized maker of decent stuff that everyone starts out with, and they've built an empire with well-designed but uninspiring black nylon bags. So I haven't paid much attention to what Lowepro has been up to recently, which is probably why their recent products have knocked my socks off. This is entirely my fault.

I've recently come into possession of the brand-new Lowepro Flipside Sport 20L. It's an awesome bag that joins the smaller 10 and 15-litre capacity Flipside Sport series; the whole family combines and builds on the ideas of the Photo Sport and original Flipside series, which are pretty impressive in their own rights. There's a lot of experience and thought behind this bag.

All of the Flipsides are 'system' bags that are designed to hold lots of gear without the large other-stuff compartment that multi-use camera backpacks have. The 20L Sport is voluminous without being overly bulky; it can carry my F5 or D800 with grip attached quite comfortably, even when one has a lens on it. None of my many other backpacks can do that, even when they take up the same amount of room on the bus.

The broader 'Flipside' design ethos is for a high-security pack that opens from the back, with only minimal exterior pockets. The Sport model distinguishes itself with an interesting tripod attachment method, trekking pole holders, ventilated shoulder straps, and the ability to hold a sold-separately hydration bladder. And, of course, it's available in orange.

The Flipside Sport 20L is not quite as spartan as the smaller 10L and 15L models. Most significantly, the 20L adds several layers of pockets to the front of the bag. Two of them are flat pockets with side zippers that can expand somewhat, and even the smaller one can hold a paperback-book-sized object. They don't have any internal dividers or organizers, however, which is something of a missed opportunity.

The third pocket, which opens across the top of the bag, is a 'storage panel' that's inherited from the standard Flipside 400 and 500 models. It's much more substantial than the side-zippered pockets, and has several interior organizing sub-pockets. It's still sized for things that are mostly flat, but one section is padded and big enough to protect a tablet or 11" Macbook Air. I have to confess that I feel like a bit of a genius for buying that diminutive computer, because it fits in all kinds of surprising places.

There are also two flat pockets inside the bag, one in the storage panel and the other inside the camera compartment, that are zippered and perfect for storing passports and travel documents. Very handy.

It's not limitless, but there's a lot of space in this bag. The photo above includes my D800 with grip and 60/2.8G macro lens attached, V1 with 30-110 attached, F5, 85/1.8D, and Sony 7506 headphones each in their own compartments; the 1-system 10-30mm and 18.5mm lenses share a compartment, as do the Nikon 50mm 1.4G and 1.4D lenses. There's room in the front pockets for my laptop and audio recorder that completes my setup, or I could easily swap something out to carry the bulky GA645zi medium format camera as well. If I'm not careful I can easily make this bag too heavy to carry comfortably, so I let that be my guide when I'm packing it for an outing.

And no, I don't think it's odd to concurrently own and use both Nikon 50/1.4 lenses.

Increasing the Flipside Sport's flexibility even more is that the entire padded camera compartment is removable, and even comes with its own drawstringed dust cover and handles to facilitate the process. So in a matter of seconds the bag goes from carrying a billion dollars of equipment to being a spacious and free-spirited daypack. I wouldn't plan for that as the bags' main use, but it's a nice option for unexpected contingencies.

The Flipside Sport's tripod attachment method is unorthodox but clever. Instead of the usual cup-the-feet and lash-the-top method, there are two heavy-duty bands that the tripod straddles, broad fabric flaps that cover them, and two webbing-and-buckle straps that secure everything in place. This holds the tripod very solidly without the usual wobble, covers the attachment points to stop it from snagging on branches and whatnot, and is fairly easy to use.

This attachment method can even simultaneously hold my Joby Gorillapod Focus and the shockmount system for my audio recorder, which a more typical tripod carrying method wouldn't permit. It's also a place to hold a sweater or jacket, which simply wouldn't fit anywhere else. Monopods are a bit more of a challenge, but could work as long as they have a head or platform to catch on the top of the support bands.

Another nice detail is that the grey accents on the bag really are grey. The various straps and fabrics don't give identical White Balance eyedropper values, and don't quite match my WhiBal card, which doesn't match Ezybalance, which also doesn't quite match my Passport – my point being that white balancing is always something of an approximation anyway. Sometimes "close enough" is good enough, and that's what we have here.

The readings for horrible fluorescent lighting that I took these pictures under varied by only 50-100K, with just a few points difference on the green-magenta bias, both from various greys on the bag and my WhiBal card. That's good enough for me. Of course, I can't attest to its consistency under different light sources, so as always I recommend testing it for yourself under field conditions before relying on any backpack as a white balance reference.

The non-tripod side of the Flipside Sport has the pocket for a water bladder, but despite its height and expandable pleat it's strangely useless for anything else. It doesn't hold nearly as much as it looks like it should, but if it can't zip closed then there's a webbing strap that can hold things in place. And there's nothing that stops it from being the world's largest MP3 player pocket, either.

The non-removable waist belt has lightly padded sides with mesh pockets, but these pockets have elastic tops instead of the zippers of the Photo Sport series. They might be handy for temporarily stashing snacks or lens caps, but I'd never trust my phone or compact camera in one. Ultimately the waist belt is my biggest disappointment with the bag, since it's not much better than a simple webbing strap, and yet it's not removable for the times when it's not needed. A good removable belt would be ideal, such as the one on my Kata 261PL 'Source', but I'd even prefer a simple removable webbing strap to the built-in one.

All of the Flipside Sports come with Lowepro's tethered All Weather cover. The back-panel access means that the camera compartment is already well-protected against rain and snow, but it also means that the camera compartment can be reached even when the AW cover is in place. So the cover is less necessary for its intended purpose, but is incredibly useful to protect the bag from dirty or damp surfaces when it's set down. I'd call that a win-win situation.

Something to add to the Flipside Sport is a little 'toiletries bag' that can aggregate and organize small incidentals. My Stealth Reporter 200 came with one, and after I stopped scoffing at the idea it turned out to be incredibly useful. It takes up a lens compartment, but is a great way to hold spare batteries, cable releases, film, earplugs, pill bottles, wireless remotes, earphones, housekeys, and all of life's other little necessities. The 20L is so large that losing a lens slot isn't a big deal, so it's a useful addition to a bag that lacks spacious everything-else pockets. Highly recommended.

Having the 20L Flipside Sport in my vast collection of camera bags is important to me. It's the only bag that can carry all three of my Nikon systems and favourite lenses, making it perfect for my brief but gear-heavy summer excursions to exotic places like the Leslie Street Spit. Assuming the ever-evolving carry-on regulations permit it, it would also be my choice for cross-continent trips when I'm able to carry a second bag for trivialities like a few changes of clothing. No, it wouldn't be my first choice for small street shooting kit, but it's a solid landscapists' working bag and it moves gear like nothing else.

Here's the funny thing: I like the Flipside Sport 20L so much that I spent weeks thinking about adding the Photo Sport 200 to my collection as well. That bag is a perfect compliment to the Flipside Sport, being a skinny little thing that's biased towards quick access to only a small amount of camera gear with lots of room for carrying non-photographic essentials. Ultimately I decided that I wanted something a little more urban than technical, and added a different Lowepro backpack to the family instead, and now it's my everyday-carry compliment to the more specialized Flipside Sport.

If anyone's interested in buying a lightly used Kata 3N1-22, let me know.

last updated 27 mar 2013

Lowepro Stealth Reporter D200

Concept: 2 out of 5
Execution: 2 out of 5
Yeah, but: Just because it's good doesn't mean I'll like it.

The Long Version: When I first started out I had a couple of Lowepro bags. I mean, we've all been there, right? But then we move on. So it was with a certain sense of shock that I realized that a Lowepro "Stealth Reporter D200 AW" was the perfect travel bag for a recent bus trip to New York City.

Lowepro overwhelmingly makes ugly black nylon camera buckets. Fetishistically complicated, too heavily padded, and adorned with flaps, zippers, and clasps, they're exactly what every beginning photographer thinks they need. Lacking the soul of a Domke or the class of a Billingham, Lowepro is the Nike of the camera bag world: ubiquitous in the stores, heavily promoted, but outside of paid endorsements it's never seen with people who really know what they're doing. For those in the know, that oval logo with its orange accent is the photographic equivalent of wearing track pants while eating microwaved pizza.

But you know, sometimes they actually make pretty decent bags.

Take my travelling companion, the "Stealth Reporter". Aside from the brutal `90's flashback name – an italics "stealth" is even embroidered onto the back panel, in black thread on black nylon, as if that makes it okay – there's not all that much to complain about. The padding is dense but thin, so it doesn't take up most of the bag's capacity, and the buckles and zippers aren't tremendously objectionable. The bag doesn't really hide any nasty surprises: it's quite honest about them.

My biggest complaint about the nylon camera bucket school of bag design is solidly represented by the D200: it never gets any smaller. The 'stealth' even has plastic stiffeners between its layers of fabric that serve no purpose except to force the bag into its particular shape. When it's stuffed full it can't flex to accomodate its contents, and when it's nearly empty it isn't any more agreeable to carry. Stiffly padded nylon bags, no matter who they're made by, will always be my second choice when I could use a Billingham or Domke bag instead.

The Stealth Reporter D200 is a working bag that's designed for travel with a moderate amount of gear. It has a strap to fit over luggage trolleys, a rear external slash pocket, and a rear internal pocket that can fit paper folded in half – think E-Tickets – with a zippered sub-compartment that fits a passport. This is really important for a travel bag: along with its SLR-friendly capacity, it's a big part of why I swallowed my pride and took the Stealth to New York.

The front of the bag has two external organizer pockets, including one that's lined to protect gadget screens, a front slash pocket, and space between the nylon shell and the padded bucket that's also equipped with with an inner divider. All of these are full-height and quite narrow, so they're not for storing gear, but can hold thin or flat items like a travel hard drive or maybe a few sticks of gum. Forget about finding small items in a hurry – while on my trip it actually took me about twenty minutes to go through the bag thoroughly enough to accept that I'd left my wallet at home.

The front exterior slash pocket also has two small pockets near its top that are sized to fit a standard-sized DSLR battery in each. Very clever, but it violates a fundamental photographic rule: never make two things the same size. If Lowepro had made these pockets slightly different sizes, then perhaps I could have fit a battery in one and done something outrageous with the other, like carry a pack of mints as well as a tube of chapstick. Apparently that's not something that Lowepro expects "photojournalists and news photographers" to do.

The inside of the nylon and foam camera-bucket compartment is unsurprising and in need of a refresh. It has a standard velcro-and-dividers approach, but unlike newer bags that are completely lined with the soft loopy fabric, the Stealth Reporter D200 has specific strips of it that restrict where the dividers can be placed. My Kata 3N1-22 – which I used to think had a dumb name – has the same flaw but has since been updated. Perhaps Lowepro will make a Pro Stealth Reporter that fixes this in the future.

I went to New York with the bag in its stock configuration, which let me carry the D800 with a grip attached down the middle, a mid-size prime on each side, and accessories and non-camera necessities in the other two lens-sized compartments. Another option is to have two big cameras and two skinny lenses stored separately; keeping a lens on a camera is possible, but I'm rarely a fan of carrying gear this way.

An unusual feature of the bag is a weatherproofed pass-through zipper built into the lid. Some people want this to be for easy access to the camera, but with the D200 you can forget about birthing anything larger than a mid-sized lens through it. With reasonable expectations it actually turns out to be rather useful, as it bypasses the zippers and clips that keep everything bolted down the rest of the time. But designing a bag with an extra zipper to provide a convenient way to bypass its other buckles and zippers is an excellent example of solving the wrong problem.

Like almost all of its siblings, the Stealth Reporter is very well built; something tells me that Lowepro bags and cockroaches will be the ones locked in a battle for supremacy after a nuclear war. This one also has a rain cover sewn into a special compartment in the bottom if the bag, Lowepro-style; I immediately cut it free, Kata-style, to reduce the bag's bulk and give me a little bit of space for soft things like hats or really small jackets.

There is one feature of the Stealth Reporter that I initially scoffed at – hard to imagine, I know – but actually turned out to be quite useful. It includes a small nylon toiletries bag that has a zipper along three sides, and even has a clear business-card holder on the front. (There's another of those on the outside of the D200 as well.) This is where I put all of the little odds and ends: phone charger, extra film, batteries, and so on. Essentially, anything small that would have happily gone in the front pockets of a Domke or a Billingham can go into this pouch that only took up one of the four available lens slots.

By having all of the bits and pieces collected in the toiletries bag it was easy for my to take the entire pouch out through the lids' pass-through zipper, retrieve what I needed, and then slip the rest away again. This pouch even adds orange trim around its edges, making it easier to find inside the Reporter's relentlessly grey-on-grey nylon interior. And because it's carried inside the bag, this small concession to usability and styling doesn't detract from the bag's Stealthiness.

The bag also includes a massive nylon memory card wallet that can hold a dozen compact flash cards. It's very impressive, and has a little loop that lets it be tethered to either of the bags' two keyfob leashes, as well as a simple velcro belt loop that lets it attach to any of the six lash points on the outside of the bag. I can see this being very useful for people who don't like cards that are higher than 4GB capacity in this era of 75MB raw files. Unfortunately it's not quite big enough to also hold a portable hard drive, but one could be tucked into a couple of the front slash pockets easily enough.

The Reporter can carry a substantial amount of gear, but despite its size the D200 is a pretty small bag. Two cameras with two small lenses or flashes, or one camera with a big lens or two. The height of the bag means that smaller lenses can be stacked with other items, which was very handy for travel, but like all bags it's easier to work out of when it's not stuffed to the gills.

As a travel and working bag, the Stealth Reporter is excellent if you happen to like this kind of thing. It solves some very specific problems better than my other bags: it holds two big SLRs, like the D800 and F5 pictured above, can fit a bunch of lenses, and securely carries travel documents. Make no mistake – the Lowepro Stealth Reporter is a high-quality product and exceptionally good at its job.

Lowepro makes very clever bags, and they make dozens of them. Each one is conceived for a certain use or niche (rhymes with quiche) with all kinds of little tweaks and bits that pull the bags away from general-purpose and toward specialization. Whether their designs are widely copied, like the Slingshot, or blatant copies, like their Pro Messenger series, these aren't versatile bags that will become cherished classics.

Notwithstanding all of the Stealth's many strengths, I'm not a fan of the Lowepro's aesthetics, dislike its design objectives, and don't agree with its stiffly-padded worldview. But it did what I wanted and, since I bought it at a clearance sale, it cost what I was willing to pay. The last time I bought a camera bag with expediency and budget as my main considerations I ended up with the Lowepro Micro Trekker, which I hated after just a few hundred miles, so compared to that the Stealth Reporter and I are off to a great start.

If only they had picked a different name.

last updated 29 june 2012

Lowepro Micro Trekker 200

Concept: 2 out of 5
Execution: 2 out of 5
Yeah, but: Some people actually like it.

The Long Version: Lowepro makes many, many backpacks, ranging from the massive and expedition-worthy to this cross between a camera carrier and a child's book bag. In September of 2007 I had an acute and decisive need for a camera backpack, and bought the MicroTrekker200. I thought that since I couldn't buy the one I love - Think Tank's Glass Taxi - I'd lug the one I was with.

What you see in the photo above is how I load my MicroTrekker. On top is an Olympus E-510 with the 35-100 f/2, and on the bottom is the Olympus E-1 wearing the 7-14 f/4. The empty space is big enough to squeeze a really small lens, but nothing else. Lowepro's own description of this bag says it will carry "SLR with attached 80–200mm f/2.8 lens (most makes) plus 3 more lenses," so while my equipment is pushing it, it's not completely unreasonable.

There are two different styles of camera bags: access bags and transporting bags. A bag that I'd choose for frequent access is a shoulder bag like the little Domke F6 or the larger Crumpler 6M$H, which carries just as much as the MicroTrekker. Backpacks are a poor choice when good access to the gear is essential, but they make up for it with the ease that they carry gear over long distances.

And this is where the problem starts. Despite its diminutive dimensions, it's possible to pack some serious weight. The backpack is built very well and shows no signs of wear or distress, but the very thin and barely padded straps are not up to the task. To make matters worse, at six feet tall, I'm far larger than the smurf that this backpack is sized for and the straps cut into my shoulders no matter how I adjust the bag. After a typical day's shooting this bag leaves me sore and with large red welts from the straps. Granted, it solved the problem that I needed it to -- getting my camera gear safely on short-hop flights when I also needed to carry on a small duffel -- but now that I'm home I don't see its purpose.

My MicroTrekker is painful to use, difficult to access, and doesn't carry more than a decent shoulder bag. Perhaps my difficulties are from the weight of the equipment that I carry, but if someone's only carrying light gear why not just use a shoulder bag? The compromised access of this backpack just isn't worth its carrying capacity. Other people disagree, which I completely understand, but I'm wracked with guilt at the thought of selling this bag because of the pain and suffering that it could cause some other photographer. When you see a craigslist ad specifying that the buyer must be under 5'6", you'll know who placed it.

Updated November 2009: I've since passed the Micro Trekker along to another photographer, who is very happy with it. There's a good reason why there's so much diversity in the type and size of camera bags available, and there's equally good reason to make sure that the one you're buying is the best one for you. Trying them in person, loaded with the gear that you'll be carrying, is far more revealing than any number of hours spent reading about them.