Barber Shop Razor Cut leather wrist strap at a glance:
- Available in four finishes
- Price: £45
- Website: www.barbershopbags.com/en
Italian company Barber Shop specialises in real-leather camera bags, straps and accessories, with unusually stylish and high-quality designs. Its Razor Cut wrist strap is an elegant means of securing your camera if you prefer not to use a neck strap.
The design is fairly straightforward, consisting of a wide leather strap lined with soft microfibre material, which loops around onto itself using a metal D-ring. This wraps loosely around your wrist in normal use, but if you accidentally let go of the camera, the strap pulls through and tightens, hopefully saving your kit from a costly fall.
The strap clips onto your camera’s lug using a chunky metal carabiner, with a large protective leather pad beneath to protect the camera body from scratching. If your camera has slot-type lugs, the idea is to attach the strap using a sewn-in loop of red, white and blue-striped material, which passes through the lug then clips onto the carabiner. While this approach does work, I’d be decidedly nervous about trusting a heavy DSLR to this slim loop of ribbon.
Indeed, having tried the Razor Cut strap on a range of cameras, I found it only really worked well with larger enthusiast models that have decent size handgrips and eyelet-type lugs – essentially cameras such as the Nikon D7200, Pentax K-1 or Sony Alpha 7 II. On smaller cameras such as the Olympus OM-D E-M5 II or Fujifilm X-T1, it’s just too bulky to be comfortable to use, and the pad that protects the camera gets in the way of your grip.
Available in four finishes – black, brown, perforated dark brown and a rather questionable calf-hair option – the Razor Cut strap is made of high-quality leather and impeccably finished. It also comes very presentably packaged, so could make a nice gift.