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This is a shoulder bag in the same sense that you could hypothetically pick up a woman and carry her home on your shoulder, assuming a) she's into that, and b) you've got a chiropractor appointment booked in advance. Seriously, it is enormous. You can put all your gear in it, and I do mean all. And then you can buy more gear and attach it to the 6 pouch attachment loops on the sides. Note that I am 6'1 and 210 lbs. on a good day, and I've often scoffed at the comments lesser (well, shorter) people make about thus-and-such product being too big. This one is just...big.
I bought this bag as a fixture for my RV. Well, actually I didn't realize it was quite so huge when I ordered it, but I instantly decided on that use for it when it arrived. I needed a bag to hold the following:
A pro-shape (battery handle-bearing) Nikon D800 with a 70-200 pro (f2.8) lens nose-down
A Leica M9-P with large (for Leica) lens
A Sony NEX-7 with long (for the NEX-7) lens
A Nikon 70-400 telephoto zoom lens
A couple of midsized Nikon zooms
Six more Leica lenses
A medium-sized flash for each camera
A 17" Cracbook Pro Retina with 2-3 external hard drives
Several filters, extra batteries for everything, cables, cleaning gear, and other junk
This bag consumed all of that except the laptop, sort of (see below), and it's still a little bit hungry. I will note that I chose to mount a couple of those LowePro quick-change lens pouches on one side, using their loop/slot system, and I store the 70-400 in one of those. I also put a 75 AW flash pouch and a general carry pouch on the other side, mainly so I can take these 4 pouches off to assemble a web belt harness thing if I need to. If I so chose, I could get all that stuff into the bag itself easily enough.
The thing that sold me on this bag instantly was the solidity of the inner partitions, especially the ones between the slots meant for cameras. They are velcro-fitted like those things always are, but these are really solid compared to those in any other bag I've seen, even other LowePro bags like the Stealth Reporter. I consider that bag to be pretty solid too, but this one is a whole other level. The front half of the main compartment consists of three full-sized, full-depth, square camera nest slots with solid padded specially-shaped walls between them. These are the first configurable partitions that ever said "pro" to me; that felt trustworthy. You could easily get three "pro"-shape (square-backed/battery handle) bodies with mounted long lenses in there, each nose down, if you didn't mind their grips touching a little. If you were to put 2 pro bodies with long lens nose down in the front corner slots, with a smaller camera (or long lens) in the front center slot, nothing would touch anything else.
The narrower 2nd row is a warren of configurable partitions for everything else. I usually hate those stacking cubbyhole partitions, but in the case of this bag, they aren't so awful because they're solid too. All my Leica lenses fit in about 1/2 of the back row, double-stacked with amply padded flip-up hatch partitions separating them.
There are large front and side pockets, and the usual rear slit paperwork-only pocket. The front one is big enough for chargers and cables and travel hard drives and that sort of stuff. The side ones are useful for miscellaneous stuff unless if you are going to hang additional pockets off of the side loops, in which case using the side pockets would create awkward angles for the hanging gera. I am doing that, so I only put flat cleaning cloths and other durable, thin things in the side pockets. There are six side loops but really you can only use two on each side unless there's some sort of really thin pouches I don't have, or if you really wanted to cram things together. I'll probably end up using 2 quick-change long lens pouches on one side, and leave the other side clear.
There's a slot through the back that's obviously intended for a cart. I usually don't like luggage carts, but for this bag, I'd make an exception. The shoulder strap is heavy-duty and padded, though you still couldn't carry this bag very far with any amount of gear in it. Incidentally, that's due as much to the squarish thickness front-to-back as to the weight of the gear. The massiveness of this bag means the carry handle centered on top is useful only when it's mostly empty, and when the lid is fastened down. I guess it's also useful for dragging the bag around the floor a bit.
The 2 things I don't like about this bag are as follows:
a) There's a little pocket up top, off to one side of the central carry handle. Because there's a webbing loop on the opposite side, I assume this pocket is meant to sit the feet of a tripod in, but all I can get in there is a small tripod or large monopod. Given the size of this bag, I'd like to see a real full-sized tripod solution, unless I'm missing something and there's a way to do it, which is entirely possible.
b) The laptop insert is interesting, in that it's got, like, this whole puppet theater thing going on, with the stiff hood and blinders. But it's also very excessively massive and bulky. Also, I can imagine folding it out in the field maybe once or twice in my life, at the most, at high noon in a desert or something. There is no slot in this bag to just jam your laptop down into, in the front or rear, and there really needs to be, since this bag has plenty of space for such a slot, and it's all I'd have needed. I was using a Cracbook Air 11 when I got this bag, and it was ludicrous in that insert case, like a little kid trying on his mother's muu-muu. Though maybe less creepy of an image.
Sooo, moving right along: the laptop case doesn't slot down along the rear or front of the bag. (If it did, you could use that slot without it, which would be nice.) Instead, this podium-encyclopedia-sized padded insert must be be laid on top of all your other gear, just under the bag's lid. That means you lose height, which is a sincere bummer when you want to store one or more DSLR pro bodies with 70-200 lenses mounted nose-down. Since that's the exact reason I got this case, I had to just remove the laptop insert and put it in yet another bag. If you didn't have nose-down cameras with mounted long lenses, you could use the laptop insert, but you'd still have to take it out and put it aside whenever you removed anything from the bag's main section.
b) alone is the reason this review isn't 5 stars. Maybe I'd give it 4.5 if I could, but I can't, and there's no excuse for not being able to get both a pro body (or three) with big lenses and a laptop into this bag.
Otherwise, I've never seen a better "everything" camera bag for fixedor vehicle-based use.
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