The GoPro Hero is the tiniest GoPro the company has ever made. Featuring 4K30FPS capture and weighing a mere 86g, it’s an impressive feat of engineering in an equally impressive compact package. Throw in some nice quality-of-life features, and you have the makings of one of the most impressive smallest action cameras on the market.
Featuring GoPros’ signature look and feel the Hero looks very much like a condensed Hero series camera. It’s an impressive design offering much of the control and features of the Hero series cameras in a package that measures 47.7mm high, 56.6mm wide and only 29.4mm thick. It easily fits into almost any pocket with ease.
Controls for the Hero area are handled by two built-in buttons: the power/mode button located on the lower left side of the unit and the shutter button located along the top right of the camera. Each can be programmed to handle multiple operations with ease. For example, the shutter button can be assigned to perform a QuikCapture function that, when pressed immediately, powers on the Hero and begins recording. Pressing it again ends the recording and shuts off the camera.
The whole operation takes about 5 seconds to activate, which, while helpful, could be a bit faster for those moments of capture you weren’t planning for. This happened a couple of times during testing, where I ended up missing a bit of the start of action sequences while the camera fired up and began to record. With a bit of practice, I mastered the QuikCapture timing and was able to leverage this feature to its full extent.
To further enhance control of settings on the GoPro Hero, it also includes a full-back touch screen for navigating the built-in modes, settings and media review. It’s a simple and easy-to-use UI that is quite intuitive. In regards to modes, the Hero offers three modes: Slow-Mo, Video and Photo. While these modes may feel fairly self-explanatory, video mode, which shoots at a full 4:3 aspect ratio, requires a bit of unpacking.
“The GoPro Hero is a camera that lets you capture more of the action with less effort.”
In this mode, the Hero leverages all of the 165° lens, which provides a taller frame and capture, giving the user total freedom to format footage to various aspect ratios in post without losing the essence of the capture. It essentially gives you an impressive amount of control over the final video without a lot of extra setup before shooting.
This is perhaps the strongest design feature of the Hero. It feels like the point-and-shoot of the action cameras. It’s designed to minimize the setup and maximize capture time, leaving things like format, stabilization and filtering until post-production. The GoPro Hero is a camera that lets you capture more of the action with less effort.
Continuing an inspection of the Hero, we find that the front face of the camera features an impressive 12MP sensor that does an excellent job of capturing detailed quality during filming. Colour capture, specifically, feels true to life and rich. With support for 4K30FPS, the Hero does a solid job at capturing detail. I was particularly impressed with the capture of shots taken in and underwater, as shown in the demo reel.
It should be noted that while the 12MP sensor does an excellent job capturing in daylight or well-lit spaces, it does begin to suffer in low-lit areas or at night if there isn’t adequate lighting. While the Hero can still capture, the overall detail and quality of the capture do suffer. As an action camera, though, I didn’t have high expectations of low-lit shots and wasn’t surprised at the GoPro Hero’s low-light test results.
The lens also captures slow-mo at 2.7K60FPS, making for some solid slow motion shots. While the slow motion does work as advertised, I would have liked to see a bit more control over the settings and capture experience. There were a few times when it didn’t quite capture the slow-motion shot the way I would have hoped, as in the rollercoaster shot in the demo reel. It did slow it down, but it wasn’t as dramatic a capture as I would have hoped.
As for capturing photos, the Hero provides a solid but limited picturing-taking experience. To elaborate, the GoPro Hero does a great job at a point-and-shoot photo but lacks the settings to give the user the kind of control they might want on a photo. In the sample photo, for example, while I would have loved to focus in on the candle and pushed for a more blurred background, the lens isn’t designed to allow for that kind of shooting.
This isn’t so much a critique as it is an example to help reinforce the purpose of the Hero. It’s built to capture the action fast and without the hassle of complex setups. At that, it excels. It simply cannot be pushed beyond that design.
“…the GoPro Hero does a great job at a point-and-shoot photo but lacks the settings to give the user the kind of control they might want on a photo.”
One final note on the lens is that the Hero includes a removable lens cover that is designed to repel water and dust. It’s a nice functional design choice that offers additional protection and easy replacement if scratched. It helps ensure that the lens stays scratch and dirt-free.
Shifting to the bottom of the bottom of the Hero, GoPro has installed mounting fingers that can be used to leverage the extensive list of GoPro accessories on the market. When not needed, though, they can be folded into the bottom of the Hero, making them virtually undetectable when not in use. Once again, it’s a smart feature that works well.
Battery life on Hero is an interesting affair. After a few weeks of testing I’ve found that while it does allow for quite a bit of quick filming, the battery life doesn’t seem to last as long as I would have expected based on the company’s advertising. While I had no problem capturing throughout the day, prolonged filming does burn through battery life fairly quickly. For reference, I got about one hour from the battery when shooting in 4K.
“Where the Hero shifts from average to amazing, though, is when working with the GoPro Quik app.”
While battery saver mode will help preserve the life by auto shutting off the camera, the Hero still seems to drain the battery fairly quickly. For best results, I found leveraging QuikCapture helped extend the usage time significantly. Considering the compact size of the Hero, battery life is still well within acceptable usage.
Where the Hero shifts from average to amazing, though, is when working with the GoPro Quik app. From here all of the footage on the Hero can be transferred to your phone and easily edited to help you produce some impressive video. The most notable (and automatic) feature of the app is the Hypersmooth video stabilization software. This tool automatically stabilized all of the footage captured even before editing. It works incredibly well. The sledding and waterslide shots in the demo reel were automatically stabilized via the GoPro Quik software without input from me. The results speak for themselves.
Another element of the app that I appreciated was the ability to auto-swap aspect ratios on the fly while editing. Thanks to the aforementioned 165° lens, you have the freedom to adjust the aspect ratio to best fit the content you want to create. Simply select the clip and the aspect ratio you would like and the software does the rest.
On that note of content creation, the Quik Software has some impressive AI editing tools that make working in a timeline almost obsolete. If you want, the app can take all of your selected content and put it together, with transitions and customizable text overlay, and sync it up to an AI-selected song (based on the type of footage captured).
While any part of the generated timeline can be edited, shortened or extended, the software does an impressive job bringing it all together and can adjust the timeline to accommodate any changes you make quite quickly. This allows you to take several minutes of footage and, with ease, reduce it down to a slick highlight video with almost no effort on your part.
“So, who is the GoPro Hero for? It seems best suited for people who want to capture impressive action without any of the setup and post-production hassle.”
The only small critique I have of the software is the constant reminders of their subscription service. While it does offer some additional elements and editing assets, the constant reminders become tiresome. The AI also tends to pull in assets that require the subscription to leverage meaning you’ll need to pay attention to what elements are in your timeline before rendering the project.
Overall, though, I was quite impressed with the software. Everything from media transfer to editing is handled exceptionally well. It’s all designed to play into the theme of point and shoot, reducing the time creating and extending the time capturing. For the most part, it works quite well.
So, who is the GoPro Hero for? It seems best suited for people who want to capture impressive action without any of the setup and post-production hassle. Its compact size makes it ideal for travel, for capturing moments without a lot of notice, and for those who might be new to the world of action filming. Its price point of $179.99 also makes it ideal for enthusiasts who are just starting into content creation.
The GoPro Hero is an impressive edition of the Hero series. While the GoPro Hero lacks a few of the features present on its big brother, it nonetheless offers an impressive action filming experience with crisp, clear video. While smaller battery life and lack of camera settings might be a detractor for experienced filmmakers, its simple-to-use nature still makes it a solid offering. The QuikCapture capabilities, paired with the impressive Quick App, make it ideal as a no-hassle filming solution. Priced at a competitive $179.99, the GoPro Hero is a solid option to consider for action filming.
- Tiny by design and easy to use, our smallest 4K camera features a rugged super-light design, simplified controls and more.
