The bag has two main compartments – the rear for clothing/miscellany, the front reserved for a laptop and accessories. The front compartment came with a fairly large, fairly nice padded sleeve to slip a laptop into for protection purposes. It also sports a large frontal pouch, with two seperate pockets, a key holder and a decent amount of utility room. I’ve hit the limitations of it, however. First, there’s no viable way to properly and safely store a DSLR in the bag. The impending arrival of my shiny new Rebel T2i means that were I to continue using this, I’d have to deal with lugging two bags to conferences/wherever instead of one. Second, as I became painfully aware of while walking around Berkeley during BADcamp – it’s a shoulder carried bag, and large amounts of storage is a negative feature for shoulder bags.

Technically, it does have a slide-out handle and wheels, but… Look, I tend not to follow flights of fashion or image, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. You simply cannot slide out the handle and wheel this little bag around, without accepting the fact that you are a giant tool. Therefore, the handle and wheels are nothing more than dead, useless weight – and as I was a backpacker in a former life, I’m well aware of the horror of useless weight. (Every ounce counts!)

Taking into consideration my upward mobility into the DSLR-owning class, and the fact that I’m old enough to actually feel shoulder/back pain the next day, I fired up my Internets and went shopping.

Enter: The Lowepro Fastpack 250

I’m not a photography nut, and yet even I have heard of Lowepro. While I did do some brief comparative research, I pretty much went to Lowepro straight away and remained there. My requirements were simple: whatever I bought, it needed to be a backpack, and it needed to handle a laptop, a DSLR, and some spare clothing. My choices were quickly reduced between two lines – the Fastpack line, and the DSLR Video Fastpack line. I’ve got to admit – I went with the normal Fastpack line only because of the color choices. Not that I’m a huge fan of red – but I’m a huge despiser of single-color, black luggage. (I’ve had to go around the handles of my normal luggage with white duct tape, simply to make it more distinguishable on the baggage claim conveyors.) The DSLR line has one huge advantage – external tripod mount – but for me, that wasn’t a deal breaker. I’m rather fond of the idea of a nice, compact monopod. I decided to go with the 250 – the 350′s ever so slightly larger, and necessary for a 17″ laptop – but I’ve no desire to ever again own a 17″ laptop. The 250 is pretty much the perfect size for my needs.

The laptop slot is near the back of the bag, and has very decent padding on either side. As you can see from the photo, I can fit a 13″ current-gen Macbook Air in there, along with a decently thick notebook, and still have some room to spare. I could’ve easily swapped out the notebook for a spare pair of pants, for example, which is an important thing for lengthier trips.

The top rear of the bag has a thin little pocket, which I figure will be quite suitable for travel documentation – ticket storage, car rental agreements, et cetera.

The top itself opens up, providing a decent amount of miscellaneous storage and utility – two decent sized pockets, pockets for pens, a mesh pocket, a holder for keys. I crammed a bag of full-sized toiletries in here, along with a pair of underwear, two pairs of socks, and two long-sleeved shirts – no problems.

The bottom pocket is more of a psuedo-pouch; there’s not much room, but it’s perfectly usable for small cable accessories/et cetera.

The real beauty of this bag is the camera compartment. It zips open from the side, so you have easy access to your camera, even without removing the pack. More importantly, it’s a well-padded area, complete with padded, customizable slots to provide solid storage for lenses, cables and accessories. Ultimately, the slotting can be removed entirely (if for some reason you’re not lugging around a DSLR and kit). The slots aren’t fully customizable, mind you – but there’s enough velcro scattered about that you have some options in how you set things up. Finally, there’s two small pockets on the edge of the ‘door’, perfect for holding memory cards – SD or CF – again, easily accessible without even removing the pack.

There’s a mesh pocket on the side of the Fastpack 250, perfect for holding a water bottle. There’s also a shoulder-strap mounted pocket for an MP3 player (or some other small item) – it won’t, alas, fit my third-gen iPod Nano, but it does fit my newer iPod nano quite nicely. Finally, in addition to well-padded, comfortable shoulder straps, it comes with a hip belt. That’s not exactly useful for conference crawling, but I expect I’ll get a great deal of use out of that when I go mad and run off into the wilderness.

By way of comparison, I gathered together everything (or an equivalent) that I took with me to BADcamp in October. This stuff fit into my Delsey bag with no problem and plenty of room. I got everything into my Fastpack 250 as well, but it was a much tighter fit. While the top compartment is fairly large, it’s limited by the fact that the camera compartment is damned large. Still, I managed to fit everything in without needing to throw socks next to my camera, and this’ll motivate me to actually, y’know, get travel-sized toiletries. (Re: Every ounce counts!) I weighed the two bags after packing each, and the results were pleasant. The Delsey weighed in at a little over 19 pounds. The Fastpack 250 came in at 17.

A difference of two pounds is pretty awesome, but more importantly – the Fastpack spreads the weight by virtue of being a backpack, rather than making one of your shoulders, ahem, shoulder the load. Goodbye, conference-induced pain.

Anyhow, I went to snap a quick picture of the cheezburgrz involved. I figure I need as much pictorial evidence as I can gather as to why I shouldn’t remain in Pennsylvania. I power on my Powershot SX100 IS and… Lens error, please restart camera. Beep beep beep. No power.

Restarting the camera several times, of course, did nothing. Upon returning to my present home away from home, I finished my fries while checking out the camera – noticed the shutters weren’t closing. Springs/whatever were fine; the shutters could be manipulated closed, but simply weren’t closed.

Gah.

The solution is simple though: Immediately after hitting the power button, smack the camera decently hard on its left side. With little luck involved, you’ll soon hear your lens making it’s normal lens-like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt sound.

I freaking love technology.