The Manfrotto Professional Backpack 50 is where it’s at if you want a heavy duty, compact larger size backpack that can hold a lot of equipment. The pack can comfortably hold every piece of equipment I take on travels, with room to spare. For me, that’s incredible considering I have had three different backpacks I use for travel and always have been cramming everything in them to make it fit.
My travel kit includes my full frame body, four different lenses, a compact flash, Manfrotto beFree carbon tripod, laptop, small cleaning kit, and a lot of miscellaneous small camera pieces such as remotes, chargers, batteries, etc. It all fits in the Pro 50 with room to spare. It’s amazing.
The design of the bag is really well thought out. The layout inside is interchangeable with the foam inserts ready to move around wherever you want, and the inserts are quality and study, which I have found is rare in my camera bags. The inserts in my other bags were so flimsy that they didn’t hold the equipment in place well.
There are a few different pockets on the outside that allow for extra pieces of equipment, along with the rain slicker that is available for those harsh weather locations. The outer shell of the pack is solid feeling, without being too rigid to make the pack uncomfortable to wear. The small details down to the zippers and the soft padding in the straps are high quality. The one issue I found was the tripod connection could be better- you slide one of the legs in to a small pocket and it has two straps that bind it to the pack. I feel like it was a little wobbly because the small pocket, but that’s not such an issue unless you have a really big tripod.
In summation, the bag is really well constructed, so much that I was tempted to (not with my own equipment ha!) check this bag on a airline and see how it fared. However the bag is perfect carry on size, so no issues there. It is comfortable, it seems reliable, it can hold wayyyy more equipment than any other bag I have come across, and it looks real stylish in all black. I took the tripod out on two separate trips; one to the desert shoot, and one to a beach shoot. Below are some of the images I got using the pack, along with my Manfrotto BeFree carbon tripod, which I have previously reviewed and highly recommend. I hope this review helps you with your personal quest to find the best travel pack for all your adventures!
