Lowepro Vertex 200 AW Backpack

Pretty good product. Its a bit heavy, but sturdily constructed. Main compartment zippers sealed for water resistance.
Would like more pockets/storage spaces however. Holds my Nikon D300, flash, set of filters, 70-200mm 2.8, 17-70mm 2.8 along with a GPS device.

Pros:

The backpack is very good to use when you're out on a hike. It's adjustable in lots of ways, and the straps that go around your lower back help to balance the weight. It has lots of space for all your equipment (including 15" laptop and sturdy tripod).

Cons:

The bag is somewhat heavy, even without equipment in it. The top lock for the tripod needs to be unlocked to get to the main compartment, and the tripod can slide somewhat back and forth when you're opening the bag. I couldn't see any space for food/drink, the compartments outside the bag are to tight to be used for a drinking bottle. Of course, if you don't have a full bag of equipment you could put your lunch in a plastic container inside the equipment compartment, but I wouldn't feel safe about that.

All in all a good product, but most useful for longer trips, not for casual walkabouts. For that it is a bit too clunky.

Very good camera backpack with lots of space to caryy camera and it's accessories.
But the laptop compartment looks to be small for 15.4 inch and very tight. one more drawback is we can not keep the manuals and laptop together.

First, the good:

It's plenty of room to accommodate most of your gear. I particularly fit the following equipment:

- 1 Pentax K10D with the battery grip attached
- 1 Pentax SMC DA* 50-135mm f/2.8 with the hood on (attached to camera)
- 1 Sigma 400mm 5.6
- 1 Pentax SMC-M 50mm f/2
- 1 Pentax DA SMC 18-55mm
- 1 Pentax DA SMC 50-200mm
- 1 Vivitar 2X Teleconverter
- 3 UV/PL filters (67mm)
- 1 Sakar flash

And there's space for more; however, I consider that there's room for improvement:

- Laptop compartment is in the front of the backpack. Meaning that if you lay down the backpack to access your camera and have a laptop in it, you'll have to deal with the "heavy" top as your laptop is in the front flap. Many manufacturers place this compartment in the back (the part that is against you when using the backpack)

- I wish the pockets meant as filter holder in the front/left part of the backpack would have been elastic. I have a couple of 67mm filters in their cases and even though the pockets are big, they are not big enough to fit the cases.

-I wish the top part of the backpack would have had a "quick access" system (with zippers or Velcro) to access your camera. This is just a personal observation!

- I wish it would have more external pockets, as there's space to incorporate those.

Overall, I like this backpack really much. It is very comfortable and feels very well constructed. My gear feels very safe in it. Its "all weather" construction is a plus.

I bought this pack just before a 3 week trip to Patagonia. It had no problem carrying all my photo gear and laptop for the trip. Overall it's a good pack, can use a lot of improvement in the comfort area.

This pack, as all backpacks do, suffers from the "take off the pack, put it on the ground, get out your stuff" problem, but that's unavoidable with a backpack. On the other hand, the nice thing about the pack is that the quick access zipper pouches are very nice. All of your batteries, memory cards and filters are very accessible. This is about as good as it gets with a backpack.

The major drawback to this pack I found was that it's not comfortable to wear, particularly on longer hikes. Lowepro is known to make solid, comfortable packs but this is not one of them. A friend and I both had the pack and despite all the adjustment straps we couldn't get the load to distribute comfortably. In fact, in both of our cases, the shoulder straps buckled right where they met the backpack. The pack just didn't fit correctly.