The postman, who at my apartment always rings twice because he comes while I'm still asleep, dropped off a package this morning. After reading the piece about bags last week, the Lowepro people felt left out and resolved to send a couple of yet-to-be released gadget bags for the Gadget Lab to check out. They are the Inverse AW 200 and the Nova AW 200.
The smaller Inverse is a belt pack style bag. A padded strap holds it to your waist and an optional shoulder strap balances things out. It will fit a small camera kit inside. You can see from the picture that it easily swallows a Nikon D60, a 50mm lens and a flashgun. There are a few outside mesh pockets for sundries (lens caps and cigarettes) and a couple of tiny, memory card sized compartments inside the lid. It would be better if the waist strap was removable, but it can be kind of tucked in at the back.
Round the front there is a rather confusing arrangement: kind of a half pocket which wraps around the face of the bag. I wondered about it for a while, but it turns out to be a neat place to stow the waist strap. I'm not sure if that is its intended use, but it works.
I could have done with this bag last weekend on a camping trip. The waist strap takes the pressure off you poor backpack-laden shoulders and offers nice quick access. It has a built in rain cover, too.
The other bag is a behemoth. My better half said that it would fit a baby or a small dog. You'd have to remove the internal padded sections, but otherwise she's dead right. The Nova will fit everything. There's no way I could fill it to test, but you can see in the photos that there's space for a couple of big DSLRs with lenses attached, plus room for at leas five more lenses and a couple of strobes. Sundry pockets inside and out should take care of the other necessary widgets.
While the Nova doesn't look so big on the floor, lift it up fully loaded and you'll be visiting a chiropractor before the day is done. The front to back depth of the bag makes it stick out a lot when you cross the strap to the opposite shoulder. Uncomfortably so, in fact. Letting it hang from the shoulder on the same side as the bag is much better, and the padded, grippy strap should keep you free of blisters even as your spine is crushed. Big, boxy and well protected, this is a plain bag. So plain in fact that it's almost impossible to have an opinion about it. Impossible unless you hate the almost-navy-blue color, which I do. The Nova, too, has a rain cover, which is thankfully gray, and therefor perfect for covering up the ugly blue. Prices and launch dates are both undecided.
I'll be thrashing these bags over the next couple of weeks to see if I can break them. And if anybody in Berlin has a baby or small dog that needs carrying, get in touch.
Company page [Lowepro]
