I saw an article on Canon Rumors about his seeing Beta Shell cases at CES. I figured I would give them a try and got one for my 24-70 and one for my 70 -200.
For me they are great. If you want something to give high protection to your lens I don't think you can beat these things. It's like a Pelican case for your lens.
Where I live, going anywhere by air involves flying out and back in on a small regional puddle hopper. My biggest fear has been that one of these times they would insist on gate checking my photo bag. Now I’m not really concerned. I generally take my 24 – 70 and 70 – 200 along with my 1D IV on trips and with these things if they want to gate check I will just put my 1D IV around my neck and rest assured that they can throw my bag around all they want and my lenses will be fine.
I have already used them for some car travel and they and my camera fit with room to spare in my Kiboko 22L main compartments. One additional thing I did was get rubber hoods. I am a lot more at ease traveling with my equipment now. The camera itself is the only thing I have any concerns about when my wife throws her suitcase on top of my bag.
The downside for some folks will be that the lens in the case is bigger around than without the case, so if you are stuffing as much as you can in your bag these probably won’t be for you.
I saw them at CES as well. I was highly impressed. As a guy who ships a lot of technology products around, this is exactly the kind of thing you want. I spent a while talking to the owner/inventor - very good guy. There are a lot of thoughtful touches in what looks like a simple design.
I think the design is sound, but not totally sold on the usability? If you have several lenses, putting each in a beta shell seems awful clunky, compared to a pelican case. If they are intended for field use in your camera bag, they also seem much too bulky to be practical, at least for the uses I envision (outdoors/hiking). I guess if you're bringing one or two lenses on vacation with you, it might work.
And my main concern with transporting lenses in airline baggage is not really damage, it's theft.
I agree. Yikes, the container weights are quite high relative to the weights of the lenses. I don't see the value for air transport for users of multiple lenses including long teles.
