chimmy's Full Review: Tamrac 5550 Adventure 10 Backpack 555003
This is a backpack camera bag mostly designed for the traveling semi-pro. In that facility, Tamrac made a number of design decisions that are either anachronistic or just plain wrong.
Pros:
It stands up by itself.
The Velcro departments have enough room to be installed in a slanted position so your gear doesn't tumble all out when you open the pack while straight up or on someone's back. It would have been a nice touch to have elastic mesh on the bottom of the dividers to ensure the equipment doesn't inadvertently fall out.
It nice to have a separation of the two main compartments. I carry a beanie hat, long scarf, gloves and a water-proof windbreaker everywhere I go. Eventually these items shed lint and fibers that always find their way onto the sensor.
All of the compartments in the lower section of the bag are padded. This is good not only to keep your equipment from getting damaged, but also a good way to deter razor-blade-wielding pick-pockets. Bags with just one layer of material can be sliced open without you feeling a thing.
Cons:
There are no straps on the back of the bag that allow you to secure it to your rolling luggage handle. While waiting around in an airport or train station, it's nice to take off the camera bag and secure it to the carry-on roller bag.
It's both too small and too big. I've got to carry a Canon 100-400 in this thing and it just isn't going to fit. The specs say it's 25 inches tall. It's not even close. To get that to be true, you need to put your foot in the bottom compartment and pull up hard on the handle to stretch the thing as far as it will go. Even then will it only approach 22 inches tall; and that's measured not from the internal dimension but to the tip of the handle. Internally it's more like 16 inches. A taller bag could accommodate larger lenses and still be under the 22 inch carry-on limit.
It's too big in that it's way too thick. Every millimeter of distance the backpack projects from your back is another opportunity to bump it against walls, annoyed locals, narrow bell-tower corridors, etc. Having the two extra thick layers of padding that are in the front and back of the laptop pocket make the bag stick out a lot more and reduces the available space inside at the same time. The extra and unneeded depth also causes the bag to pull you off-balance backwards while it's on your back. A Canon 5D with a battery grip fits inside with about two inches to spare. The depth, however, is about 1/2" too short to accommodate a Canon 580EX strobe on it's side. With a MacBook Pro in the laptop slot, it sticks out a bothersome 11 inches from your back.
The included "Pop-Off Pocket" is exactly that, a pocket that will pop-off as soon as a luggage handler sees it and you'll never see again.
The little pouches along the top of the main flap are a joke; even though they're one of the "innovative features" with the little red bit of material and all. All my filters are at least 77mm. The tiny pockets barely fit a 58mm filter. They may be designed for film canisters. Some one needs to tell the Tamrac design department that it's 2008 not 1988.
The over-sized rain-flap that surrounds the bottom compartment zipper is constantly getting caught in the zipper. There are three totally pointless webbed straps that interfere with the smooth operation of the zipper. The annoying webbed straps are there for aesthetics only as they don't connect to anything solid and would not even slow down a pick-pocket.
There's no place to stow the waist belt straps while not using them, which is most of the time. They dangle down the back of your legs and catch on things. There are two hard plastic strap retainers on the bottom, but they're very much an after-thought as they're not wide enough to accommodate the waist straps.
The lower compartment flap should have the ability to act as a shelf when unzipped. Two diagonal bits of webbed strapping would suffice nicely. As it is, it flips all the way down so if you forget to zip up the main pocket, or there's anything that's not secured, everything falls out.
There's no clean solution for carrying a tripod. I prefer to not advertise that the bag is full of expensive camera gear. As such I prefer to keep the tripod stored inside the bag rather than lashed to the outside. The way the dividers are designed within the bag, there's no real way to clear a long, thin space for a tripod without sacrificing most of the space available for lenses.
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