Review Roundup: Small Camera Bags With Space For Your iPad

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This week we look at lightweight, easy-to-carry camera bags that are perfect for carrying a mirrorless camera, an iPad and a couple of other bits – because the days of crushing your shoulders with a giant backpack filled with DSLRs and MacBook Pros are over.

The Candidates

The Booq Python Mirrorless is a regular camera bag. With stealthy looks and custom built to house a mirrorless camera, a spare lens, plus your iPad mini and some accessories.

The Rickshaw Zero Messenger is not a camera bag, but its design lets you sling a small camera into a front pocket, and put your iPad and other gear inside.

The Crumpler 8-Million Dollar Home is big enough to fit a DSLR, but soft enough to be useful with smaller gear. It’s also stealthy – it doesn’t look anything like a regular camera bag – and has lots of pockets for the neat freaks out there.

Booq’s Python Camera Bag Is Perfect For Mirrorless Minimalists 

A fantastic bag for folks who use small cameras and carry iPad minis. Sure, that’s a relatively narrow demographic, but the specialization makes the result so much better for the people it suits. And even if you don’t use this with an iPad, it’s a great camera bag, period.

Buy it $80

Why Rickshaw’s Zero Messenger Is The Best Bag I Ever Owned 


Even after more than a year of solid use, it’s as good as new. The bag is the Zero Messenger from Rickshaw, and here’s why it’s so good:

The Zero Messenger Performance Tweed is made from recycled water bottles woven into a classic tweed fabric. Cut from a single piece of said fabric, it’s also cleverly folded and stitched so as not to waste any material. Hence the “Zero” in the name. Inside there is a second layer of fabric, in a light color that actually lets you find things in there.

This simple construction, along with the fairly soft strap, keeps the bag very light, weighing in at a shade over 600 grams on my kitchen scale.

The lack of weight and the soft, non-padded body make the bag super comfortable when lightly loaded, and it’s possible to carry a heavy load without breaking a shoulder. But it gets better.

Buy it $99

The Crumpler 8 Million Dollar Home: a Rugged, Charismatic Rogue 

The Crumpler 8 Million Dollar Home is a Rugged, Charismatic Rogue of a Camera Bag
A good-looking, rugged, adaptable bag that’s a little rough around edges but makes a great companion — especially for Indiana Jones-ish photographers with a sense of adventure.

Buy it $172

The winner? The Crumpler is a bit too much bag – I’ve found that they’re well-made but heavy. The Zero Messenger is the best bag here if you want to use it for everything, as well as full-on camera carrying, but for simply going out and shooting, keeping your camera protected and having space for your iPad, the Booq Python Mirrorless is the winner. It’s also the cheapest here – by far.

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