An honest review of the Spider Holster V3 system (spoilers: I kinda prefer V2...)

I’ve been using the Spider Holster V2 system for years and consider it one of the best parts of my London event photographer kit, so naturally I was wondering if I should upgrade from the V2 Spider Holster kit to the new V3 Spider Holster kit?

And let’s skip straight to the point: I really didn’t need to, and kind of wish I hadn’t. It’s much bigger than my V2 mirrorless Spider Holster kit, it’s a little (but noticeably) fiddlier to use, and the unnecessary paint job scrapes off very easily so it looks really scruffy after just four weeks of regular professional use.

However this is just my specific experience based on years of enjoying the (superior in many ways) ‘mirrorless’ version of V2. If you have V2 Spider Holsters your needs might be different, and I suspect for most people the new benefits may be worth the upgrade to Spider Holster V3.

Why I use Spider Holsters

So why do I use Spider Holsters in the first place? Overall this system is up there with my ThinkTank Streetwalker Harddrive backpack and Peak Design Everyday Sling 6L lens bag as one of my favourite ever gear purchases. I love Spider Holsters because they get my cameras off my shoulders – goodbye straps, goodbye harness, and hello hip-mounted cameras.

I love it so much I wrote a long review of the Spider Holster system, comparing it to the Holdfast Moneymaker harness, and Peak Design’s surprisingly poorly designed ‘capture plate’ system. Anecdotally I know several photographers who switched from both those systems after I raved about my Spider Holsters, and haven’t switched back.

But it’s kind of ‘buy it once and forget all about it’ sort of thing, they’re that good. I’ve never needed replacements, so I never kept up with their marketing, and completely missed the release of the extensive V3 range until recently.

At first glance on their product page looks like V3 has significantly redesigned the plates, the pins, the holsters, the belt, and the handstraps, and added a ton more accessories designed to work with the new system including a sling bag and a Holdfast-challenging harness system.

Asking around some friends who’ve already purchased the basic holster kit I’m not sure yet how the redesign improves on using the system but I have to admit the belt with adjustable holster positioning and the padding upgrades do look more appealing than the unadjustable nylon-heavy V2 belt system.

And despite me having switched to holsters-only (on my regular belt, not the V2 beast) I’m mulling a move back to their V3 belt because the weight of even my small Fujifilm cameras drags my regular belt down making me spend wayyy too much time pulling my trousers up and tucking myself back in.

So I’ve decided to take the plunge on the V3 belt system in black – the light brown one looks nice in marketing but it kind of feels like it’s aimed at aesthetic-conscious wedding photographers, and I’d prefer something stealthier, even for weddings.

Here is my review, delivered in instalments as I receive and start using it. As the YouTubers all love to say, “LeT’s DiVe In…”

Part 1a: ordering

Aaaand it’s sold out, everywhere. Even their own website cites a three week minimum wait. Some shops have the holsters, others have the belt, but buying it all separately costs a few hundred more than the £350 (average) for the kit.

So, I guess I’ll order it and wait? And that’s as far as I’ve got.

Stay tuned!

Part 1b: found one!

Later the same day I found it all in stock at The Flash Centre in the UK – I wasn’t aware of them but checked with colleagues and perfectly legit. So, I ordered the double holster belt kit in black and it arrived a day or so later. Thanks, Team TFC!

Part 2: I’ve used it for a month and… I didn’t need it, and can’t personally recommend the upgrade

I’ve been using it heavily for the last month – June is quite busy with conferences and summer parties so it’s been put through its paces. Here’s what I like and don’t like:

Like:

• The belt is nice enough. It wraps around and uses Velcro to shut, then you hold it shut with a short strap and buckle. You have a lot of freedom to slot the holsters into positions that work for you – not that the original belt with fixed placement was a problem because most of the time I’m putting them in the exact same place.

• It works pretty much like it always has, and I love that system, so that counts as a Like I guess, that they didn’t break the one thing this system aims to do. Except… while they didn’t break the system as such, my experience is that it’s not quite as easy to use as it used to be, which brings us to…

Don’t like:

• I hate that they don’t do a mirrorless kit any more. If you’re used to those gloriously small but perfectly formed metal mirrorless holsters, you’re gonna hate the new holsters which are one size fits all and they are massive.

• I don’t like the concerningly flexible plastic belt clip material that the metal holsters themselves are bolted to. I get that I can probably buy replacement belt clips if I accidentally break one off, but the cynic in me thinks they made that part so flexible precisely because it might help them push more sales in replacement parts. I don’t see any other reason for it to be so flexible. The clips also huge, like everything else in the V3 design.

• Don’t like that they’ve spray painted the holsters black with crappy cheap paint that will scuff when you look at it, let alone use it professionally several days a week. My two black V3 holsters are already heavily scuffed from four weeks of regular and entirely normal use. I suppose some people consider the well-worn look to be desirable, but I think it just looks like shit on these holsters. If I wanted to sell them on the value will certainly have dropped dramatically based on how bad they look.

Compare how bad they look after four weeks of use to how good my raw metal mirrorless V2 holsters look after years and years of use:

See the problem? These black V3 Spider Holsters are practically brand new, and this isn’t excessive use, or careless use, it’s just real, practical use at a couple of events per week, for four weeks. And yet the smaller V2 mirrorless holster in the middle has seen years and years more use than the two V3 holsters. It’s beautiful.

So yeah, that black paint job sucks and I wish they made raw metal versions – if they did then I would be asking them to swap mine free of charge, frankly.

(Yes I’ve contacted them to make this complaint. I haven’t heard back yet but it’s only been 24 hours at the time of writing.)

• I really don’t like that they’ve redesigned the pin head to make it much wider, with a much more severe flattened side. It is noticeably less easy to drop my cameras into the holsters on V3 than it was with the V2 mirrorless setup. Now to be fair, this is a relative comparison – the V3 works “fine”. But the V2 worked “really well” and the difference is noticeable to an experienced V2 user – I have colleagues who volunteered the same criticism after a few weeks with V3.

With V2 I feel like there was much more latitude on what angle or orientation you brought the pin to the holster slot, and much more latitude on the angle the camera was at when you pulled in out. In V3 I almost always meet a little resistance and have to ever so slightly wiggle it before it’ll drop in without resistance. Same pulling it out, there comes a point that the camera won’t move past a certain angle until it’s out of the slot. Part of this is because of the fatter, flatter pin and the corresponding holster slot shape, but a lot of it is because there is no longer a smaller mirrorless plate, which leads me into…

• I really don’t like the size of these plates compared to my V2 mirrorless plates. They are comically large on my Fujifilm X-T5s. Now, Spider assured me they’d tested it on cameras of this size and although I detected a hint of insinuation that my cameras are almost too small to be used with the system, they explained how they’ve engineered the new (huge, did I mention how massive they are) V3 plates so that you can remove the bottom square piece, rotate it 90 degrees, reattach it, and now you can slide the plate further to one side of the camera so that the battery compartment is *only just* accessible – and it really is very, very close.

So there’s a lot more metal bulk at the bottom of my cameras now – the new V3 spider holster plate juts out so much at the back on my Fujifilm X-T5s that it actually bumps against my top lip sometimes. And this additional metal bulk certainly doesn’t help the ease-of-use issue that the redesigned fatter-and-flatter pin causes with re-seating the cameras in the holsters, especially in the fast pace of a live event.

Overall

I could have not bothered, honestly. Could have saved myself several hundred quid and have a much better experience with the V2 kit I already had.

I’m sure DSLR users will love it – although I maintain the pin and slot redesign is makes them fiddlier to use, and plausibly serves an intention to break backwards compatibility more than anything else – but mirrorless users, especially on smaller bodies, maybe not so much.

Should you upgrade to the V3 Spider Holster system from V2?

I kind of wish I hadn’t wasted the money tbh. If I’d tried it for free for a month I’d have handed it back and stuck with my V2 mirrorless setup with their older style of belt.

So you can probably save your money unless you have significant issues with V2 that you can tell V3 will fix – such as wanting a better official belt with capacity for more holsters, or you want better holster pins for other gear like a flash or water bottle. Outside of that, if your V2 kit works then you’re missing almost NOTHING that V3 allegedly offers, I can almost guarantee it.

I have several friends who jumped on V3 too, who had the exact same complaint about it being just a bit more fiddly than it used to be – unasked, so that tells me it’s a real issue and not one I planted in their minds by asking about it. Coupled with the shitty paint job, and how scruffy my extremely expensive holsters look after just one SINGLE MONTH, compared to almost a decade of use on the mirrorless V2 holsters which look almost flawless today, it’s an unnecessary and ill-thought-out upgrade in my honest opinion.

Personally I suspect they changed the pin and holster slot for no other reason than to break backwards compatibility, and if that’s what actually motivated it then thanks for the enshittification, Team Spider Holster. I see no other practical reason it needed to be changed so much. But if they can share why they made the change I’d be happy to republish the explanation.

For now, as they clearly won’t be changing the pin and slot designs back to V2 the least they could do is bin the black spray paint on the holsters and go back to natural metal. They just look so cheap and ugly after a month of use, it’s aggravating. I know why they’re black – to fit in with the weird sort of plastic ‘belt clip’ material they’re screwed into, which I suspect needs to be black because, well, it’s plastic.

Overall, I regret my purchase of the V3 Spider Holster kit when there was nothing wrong with my V2 mirrorless Spider Holsters. Sadly I can’t send it back now, and I can’t really sell it second hand when the paint is in such shocking condition.

I do seriously think I’ll be switching back to my older mirrorless V2 kit shortly. The raw metal holsters are much better quality all round, the pin slots in effortlessly, it all fits in my bag much more easily, and I don’t need any of their new V3 products that are – because of course they are – wholly incompatible with V2.