Disclaimer: Lowepro doesn’t know me and I don’t know them, no one has paid for me to do this review. I bought this bag for my own use and all opinions are my own.
I think one of my beefs about being a camera toting woman is camera bags. For the most part they are rather un-stylish and completely scream “HEY LOOK AT ALL MY EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT IN THIS BAG!” since they look like what they are, a camera bag.
I’m a chick, I’m allowed to want a fancy bag.
My pre-DSLR camera was much smaller, just a really fancy point and shoot camera that had an attachment for filters and whatnot, so it really didn’t take up that much room. I really miss that aspect of the camera, but I love my new camera more.
This Lowepro CompuDaypack was the first real camera bag that I bought. I thought it would be great, and it was a good choice for a first camera bag when I really didn’t quite know what I actually wanted in a bag. At the time I was looking for a bag that would hold lots of stuff, be comfortable, and not be too conspicuous. I really liked the green accents to it, plus the fact that it was water resistant. Any good camera bag should at least be water resistant, if not water proof.
I don’t think it looks too much like a camera bag, maybe just a really souped up backpack. At the time of purchase I was still having some really annoying back problems, so the uber padding on the back and the straps really helped when I took it out hiking. When you wear the bag on both shoulders (one shoulder is REALLY awkward) it evenly distributes the weight of your gear across your shoulders, and surprisingly, your lower back. At first it feels a little weird since it sits rather differently than normal backpacks, but once you adjust the straps to the perfect length then it just almost floats on your back.
I have to say, this pocket holds a whole lot of stuff. Between pens, memory cards, extra batteries, filters, cables filling this space, I still surprisingly had room to hold a few water bottles and bags of chips! I was really quite shocked at how much stuff I could hold and it still wouldn’t feel too heavy on my back.
The back pocket on this bag is padded and big enough to hold up to a 17″ laptop. That’s huge! Sadly since I no longer own a laptop I never tested it out to hold the camera and laptop at the same time, but I did manage to fill that back pocket with lots of magazines, books and miscellaneous papers one year while going on a visit to see my family.
When I first saw this bag on Amazon.com I thought this was a great idea to have the camera on the bottom and have it tilt out to get the camera out. There were many reviewers who said it was great because if you forgot to zip it shut and lifted the bag up then their stuff didn’t go flying out of the pocket and on to the floor. And its true, I never had any of my stuff go flying out while using the bag.
Here’s the downside though. It worked great while using my little Fuji Finepix S7000, but it is REALLY quite snug for my Nikon D5000. My camera is not one of the larger ones so it’s not too terrible to use, but I can see that having a bigger camera body could be a problem while also trying to carry lenses and other fun things. This also could just be a personal problem where I really don’t know how to store my camera equipment very well. I never was very good at Tetris.
Overall: I do like this bag. It’s really comfortable to wear and you can carry a decent amount of stuff in it. Granted I don’t have a whole lot of stuff, so what I do have it carried without too much of an issue. The price was not too bad, somewhere around $89 and sometimes you can find it on sale.
I probably won’t be using this bag any longer just because I found something prettier and it makes me feel a little more girly to carry it.