Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have packing cubes from several places, as it seems like I always need more, and I'm not brand loyal until a brand gives me enough reasons to never shop around. I went the Eagle Creek route given the rave reviews. I have some expensive ones from Tortuga as a result of buying some of their travel gear. I decided I wanted to try some compression options and ended up with a bunch from SuitedNomad; figured worth a try. The Eagles, as you can see in my photos, clearly make it the easiest to see what is in the pack, due to their very fine mesh. Those are not the compression option though; their compression cubes are nowhere near as transparent. The Tortugas are the most robust of the batch, but much harder to see through in comparison, to the point that it probably shouldn't even be considered transparent. The SuitedNomad's have no visibility, which is fine, as I'll give you a tip on how I worked around that. Quality-wise, no concerns at this point; they seem equivalent to the Eagle Creeks. The compression zipper is very nice; it extends the entire circumference of the bag and then some; on the largest bag, for example, the compression zipper overlaps its starting point by about six inches. My only complaint is that I wish the zippers, both of them, but especially the compression, were of a larger size (teeth size). If you're really stuffing these things tight, it can be a bit of a pain to lead the zipper around the outside with your finger, to prevent the fabric from getting caught in it, and sometimes you have to push pretty hard, and pull hard, to keep the small teeth engaging. A larger size zipper would make that easier. Now, about the lack of transparency to your belongings. I solved this problem by just buying some paper gift tags and string. If you organize your cubes at your destination by type of contents, the fact that you may have to glance at a tag for five seconds should not be an issue because you'll probably know the rough idea of where you should be looking for underwear versus bathroom. However, more importantly, the best part about tagging your cubes like this is that when it comes time to pack up at the end of your trip, you know which belongings went in which cube and should fit back in said cube. I recently went on a ski trip before I had begun doing this and at the end of the trip, with gear strewn around the hotel room, it became a challenge figuring out which items had come from which cubes to ensure we could pack everything back up into the same amount of space that we started with. Now that the cubes are tagged, it will be easy. Here's the cheap-o tags I bought: Paper Tags Gift Hang Tags with String