10 ms·

I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get. You can be more ex

by sen 3mo ago

I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get. You can be more expensive if you’re better, or you can be worse if you’re cheaper, but they’re both the downsides while living purely off brand recognition. They also blew up in a time where there wasn’t any real competition. Sony had action cameras but they were bulkier and expensive, and didn’t have the features of GoPro. These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.

Forgeties79 3mo ago
It also doesn’t help that you could probably get by with a hero 4 black even today lol Man I still can’t believe how bad the rollout of the karma was. I remember at the time everyone in my professional circles was buzzing about it. Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Feel like they never recovered
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- antisthenes 3mo ago
  Apparently (checked with AI), Hero 4 Black was the first camera with 30 fps 4k video and was released 12 years ago already (how time flies) Frankly, after 4k/30 and 1080p/60, there are strong diminishing returns, because most people these days watch videos on their phones in suboptimal conditions (or older desktops that may still be on 1080p), so what are they going to do with your 5k/6k video? Sure, you can keep doing minor improvements to sensors and optics, but for a consumer it will not justify getting a new model for $500. Also, competing with smartphone cameras which have gotten better over the years. I bet 99% of people would not be able to tell a gopro video from a phone video.
  - kylecazar 3mo ago
    Transparency on AI use is a sin now, I guess.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Admitting your sins to your competitors has always been a sin.
  - neves 3mo ago
    The greatest advantage of greater resolution is that you can cut for a better framing. But who has time to go through good of video for editing?
    - dylan604 3mo ago
      That larger image size allows for more aggressive image stabilization as well.
- palata 3mo ago
  > Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Yep, something must have gone horribly wrong with QA.
- matsemann 3mo ago
  Eh, I have a Hero 4 black. And if you as the other commenter only think about resolution it can look like that, but the difference is enormous. 4k on a gopro 13 is far far far clearer. And the stabilization is night and day. Half my hero4 videos are mostly blurry shakes and quite jarring to watch, with a bad fov. The stabilization on modern gopros is magical. The bitrate and quality is orders of magnitude better. You can now pull good quality stills from the video if you want. Hero4 can't handle anything but perfect blue sky in the middle of the day. Etc etc
fiatpandas 3mo ago
>other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper Would you mind providing a recommendation you have first hand experience with?
- matsemann 3mo ago
  It's mostly FUD and/or paid reviewers. Both DJI and Insta have good products, but also very good at sponsoring in a way where things get reviewed very in their favor, making people have an impression that doesn't quite match reality. So the meme one constantly read online about how gopros are so much worse is false. They have their issues, but mostly trade offs.
QuantumNomad_ 3mo ago
> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper. I had a GoPro many years ago. Eventually sold it because I needed the money for other things. Been thinking about buying a new action camera eventually. Got any recommendations? The one that interests me the most of the ones I’ve seen is the Insta360 X4 Air plus an underwater case for it. I want to be able to bring my camera swimming, bicycling, hiking, etc. And I think 360 degree cameras are pretty cool. Hopefully it’s not just a gimmick that loses its appeal after a few hours.
- LeifCarrotson 3mo ago
  If you're willing to put a little time into video editing, a 360 cam is great. The insta360 tools can make that a little easier if you want something simple. If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.
  - Saris 3mo ago
    The downside is the 360 editing tools are kind of sluggish and not great to work with, and even at 8k res in-camera, the export for a 'normal' looking FoV is pretty low quality compared to a normal action cam recording in 4k. I have an insta360 X5, it's neat and there's a lot of flexibility, but it does have downsides. The app is also a pile of crap, it's crammed full of ads, social media junk I don't want, it's slow as molasses, and the size of the app is massive.
    - paradox460 3mo ago
      Have you tried resolve's 3d editing?
  - herbst 3mo ago
    I'd love to film in 3d. But being dependent on a single app of a single company (that is not even a good app right now) is literally the worst feature for a hardware I could imagine.
gib444 3mo ago
> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper. Such as?
- Saris 3mo ago
  DJI Osmo cameras are good, I still have my original Osmo action and while the quality is a bit behind now, the battery life and general stability and menus are better than GoPro IMO. I've found DJI cameras also don't discharge their batteries when sitting, my gopro 11 black is somehow always dead when I grab it even after a few weeks, but my osmo action is still at ~70% after a year. Insta360 also has some neat offerings, but their software/app is absolutely abysmal, it's crammed full of ads and takes up several GB of space. It also requires an account login.
Robotbeat 3mo ago
GoPro is a US company designed in U.S. with manufacturing in Thailand, China, and Mexico. Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too. People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place. A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds). Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.) The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.
- adrianN 3mo ago
  If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.
  - groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    This is the idea behind a tariff
    - t0mpr1c3 3mo ago
      The "idea" of Trump's tariffs (if there ever was one) is to subvert the US constitution which places taxation under the control of congress, not the president.
microtonal 3mo ago
I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get. Sounds very similar to another US company - Garmin. They are still popular, but have been raising prices a lot every generation, because for a long time there was no real competition [1]. At this point, Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow (sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to re-render) because they have used the same CPU/MCU for multiple generations while increasing screen resolution. They also haven't really innovated a lot as of recently and are moving some new functionality behind a subscription. This has opened a large gap for Chinese competition. Now you can get a Coros Nomad that goes head-to-head with models like the Garmin Enduro for 350 Euro. They don't have full feature parity yet, but they are so rapidly adding features that they will at some point. Also, in contrast to Garmin, they seem to be using modern microcontrollers, so panning or zooming a map is insanely fast in comparison, while still having ~20 days of battery for daily use. [1] Of the traditional competitors, Apple Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch Ultra have gotten closer, but are nowhere near the battery life, robustness, mapping support, mapping + workout support, etc.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
  It’s interesting that you mention Garmin - they’re a good example of pivoting from your original market (standalone gps units for cars) once you see a nimble competitor eating away at it (gps-enabled smartphones). Garmin would be dead if they had held fast on the standalone GPS market.
  - radiorental 3mo ago
    I'm not sure you are fully aware of the markets that Garmin is in. When it comes to marine, aviation and offroad, you simply cannot run a gps app on a phone. E.g. https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/ https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/
    - loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
kramer2718 3mo ago
According to a quick search, GoPro has an Enterprise Valuation of $160M. That would be chump change for a large tech company. The brand has name recognition value in excess of that figure. I suspect some big company will happily buy it but not sure who. It has to be a company that wants to get into the camera market. I don't think the brand name is as valuable to an existing camera company-though I could be wrong. Apple, Google, and Amazon could all make sense. Google would see the business as an opportunity to strengthen its existing IoT portfolio. Apple an opportunity to add to its integrated consumer electronics offering. Amazon would be more a play to improve GoPro's margins. They could easily push it with prime deals, etc. I could also see Samsung getting in. Regardless, expect to see more integration, AI features, etc, after acquisition.
- dh2022 3mo ago
  If google would buy GoPro it would close it a couple of years later
teraflop 3mo ago
One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/ https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/ Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.
- konraditurbe 2mo ago
  Both Insta360 and DJI cameras save IMU / magnetometer data to their video files.
  - teraflop 2mo ago
    Thanks!
matsemann 3mo ago
A gopro isn't worse than the competition, nor at a premium. What makes gopro the standard in proper productions (and science etc) is that they're so hackable with the gopro labs software. With that, all the other cameras are toys in comparison for professional usage.
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  The bulk of the market is toys for aspiring content creators. Professional usage is pocket change subsidised by tiktokers.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
I bought one back in 2018, curious what brand would you recommend today? I wouldnt mind upgrading to something more modern but I dont care about GoPro for brands sake. Would love something I could take in the water like the GoPro.
gregdaniels421 2mo ago
It really didn't help that the HERO 13 changed a bunch of stuff for the worse, like incompatible api and other issues.

by sen 3mo ago

Forgeties79 3mo ago

It also doesn’t help that you could probably get by with a hero 4 black even today lol Man I still can’t believe how bad the rollout of the karma was. I remember at the time everyone in my professional circles was buzzing about it. Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Feel like they never recovered

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
antisthenes 3mo ago
Apparently (checked with AI), Hero 4 Black was the first camera with 30 fps 4k video and was released 12 years ago already (how time flies) Frankly, after 4k/30 and 1080p/60, there are strong diminishing returns, because most people these days watch videos on their phones in suboptimal conditions (or older desktops that may still be on 1080p), so what are they going to do with your 5k/6k video? Sure, you can keep doing minor improvements to sensors and optics, but for a consumer it will not justify getting a new model for $500. Also, competing with smartphone cameras which have gotten better over the years. I bet 99% of people would not be able to tell a gopro video from a phone video.
- kylecazar 3mo ago
  Transparency on AI use is a sin now, I guess.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Admitting your sins to your competitors has always been a sin.
- neves 3mo ago
  The greatest advantage of greater resolution is that you can cut for a better framing. But who has time to go through good of video for editing?
  - dylan604 3mo ago
    That larger image size allows for more aggressive image stabilization as well.
palata 3mo ago
> Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Yep, something must have gone horribly wrong with QA.
matsemann 3mo ago
Eh, I have a Hero 4 black. And if you as the other commenter only think about resolution it can look like that, but the difference is enormous. 4k on a gopro 13 is far far far clearer. And the stabilization is night and day. Half my hero4 videos are mostly blurry shakes and quite jarring to watch, with a bad fov. The stabilization on modern gopros is magical. The bitrate and quality is orders of magnitude better. You can now pull good quality stills from the video if you want. Hero4 can't handle anything but perfect blue sky in the middle of the day. Etc etc

fiatpandas 3mo ago

>other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper Would you mind providing a recommendation you have first hand experience with?

matsemann 3mo ago
It's mostly FUD and/or paid reviewers. Both DJI and Insta have good products, but also very good at sponsoring in a way where things get reviewed very in their favor, making people have an impression that doesn't quite match reality. So the meme one constantly read online about how gopros are so much worse is false. They have their issues, but mostly trade offs.

QuantumNomad_ 3mo ago

> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper. I had a GoPro many years ago. Eventually sold it because I needed the money for other things. Been thinking about buying a new action camera eventually. Got any recommendations? The one that interests me the most of the ones I’ve seen is the Insta360 X4 Air plus an underwater case for it. I want to be able to bring my camera swimming, bicycling, hiking, etc. And I think 360 degree cameras are pretty cool. Hopefully it’s not just a gimmick that loses its appeal after a few hours.

LeifCarrotson 3mo ago
If you're willing to put a little time into video editing, a 360 cam is great. The insta360 tools can make that a little easier if you want something simple. If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.
- Saris 3mo ago
  The downside is the 360 editing tools are kind of sluggish and not great to work with, and even at 8k res in-camera, the export for a 'normal' looking FoV is pretty low quality compared to a normal action cam recording in 4k. I have an insta360 X5, it's neat and there's a lot of flexibility, but it does have downsides. The app is also a pile of crap, it's crammed full of ads, social media junk I don't want, it's slow as molasses, and the size of the app is massive.
  - paradox460 3mo ago
    Have you tried resolve's 3d editing?
- herbst 3mo ago
  I'd love to film in 3d. But being dependent on a single app of a single company (that is not even a good app right now) is literally the worst feature for a hardware I could imagine.

gib444 3mo ago

> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper. Such as?

Saris 3mo ago
DJI Osmo cameras are good, I still have my original Osmo action and while the quality is a bit behind now, the battery life and general stability and menus are better than GoPro IMO. I've found DJI cameras also don't discharge their batteries when sitting, my gopro 11 black is somehow always dead when I grab it even after a few weeks, but my osmo action is still at ~70% after a year. Insta360 also has some neat offerings, but their software/app is absolutely abysmal, it's crammed full of ads and takes up several GB of space. It also requires an account login.

Robotbeat 3mo ago

GoPro is a US company designed in U.S. with manufacturing in Thailand, China, and Mexico. Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too. People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place. A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds). Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.) The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.

adrianN 3mo ago
If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.
- groundzeros2015 3mo ago
  This is the idea behind a tariff
  - t0mpr1c3 3mo ago
    The "idea" of Trump's tariffs (if there ever was one) is to subvert the US constitution which places taxation under the control of congress, not the president.

microtonal 3mo ago

I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get. Sounds very similar to another US company - Garmin. They are still popular, but have been raising prices a lot every generation, because for a long time there was no real competition [1]. At this point, Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow (sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to re-render) because they have used the same CPU/MCU for multiple generations while increasing screen resolution. They also haven't really innovated a lot as of recently and are moving some new functionality behind a subscription. This has opened a large gap for Chinese competition. Now you can get a Coros Nomad that goes head-to-head with models like the Garmin Enduro for 350 Euro. They don't have full feature parity yet, but they are so rapidly adding features that they will at some point. Also, in contrast to Garmin, they seem to be using modern microcontrollers, so panning or zooming a map is insanely fast in comparison, while still having ~20 days of battery for daily use. [1] Of the traditional competitors, Apple Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch Ultra have gotten closer, but are nowhere near the battery life, robustness, mapping support, mapping + workout support, etc.

loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
It’s interesting that you mention Garmin - they’re a good example of pivoting from your original market (standalone gps units for cars) once you see a nimble competitor eating away at it (gps-enabled smartphones). Garmin would be dead if they had held fast on the standalone GPS market.
- radiorental 3mo ago
  I'm not sure you are fully aware of the markets that Garmin is in. When it comes to marine, aviation and offroad, you simply cannot run a gps app on a phone. E.g. https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/ https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/
  - loloquwowndueo 3mo ago

kramer2718 3mo ago

According to a quick search, GoPro has an Enterprise Valuation of $160M. That would be chump change for a large tech company. The brand has name recognition value in excess of that figure. I suspect some big company will happily buy it but not sure who. It has to be a company that wants to get into the camera market. I don't think the brand name is as valuable to an existing camera company-though I could be wrong. Apple, Google, and Amazon could all make sense. Google would see the business as an opportunity to strengthen its existing IoT portfolio. Apple an opportunity to add to its integrated consumer electronics offering. Amazon would be more a play to improve GoPro's margins. They could easily push it with prime deals, etc. I could also see Samsung getting in. Regardless, expect to see more integration, AI features, etc, after acquisition.

dh2022 3mo ago
If google would buy GoPro it would close it a couple of years later

teraflop 3mo ago

One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/ https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/ Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.

konraditurbe 2mo ago
Both Insta360 and DJI cameras save IMU / magnetometer data to their video files.
- teraflop 2mo ago
  Thanks!

matsemann 3mo ago

A gopro isn't worse than the competition, nor at a premium. What makes gopro the standard in proper productions (and science etc) is that they're so hackable with the gopro labs software. With that, all the other cameras are toys in comparison for professional usage.

Gigachad 3mo ago
The bulk of the market is toys for aspiring content creators. Professional usage is pocket change subsidised by tiktokers.

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

I bought one back in 2018, curious what brand would you recommend today? I wouldnt mind upgrading to something more modern but I dont care about GoPro for brands sake. Would love something I could take in the water like the GoPro.

gregdaniels421 2mo ago

It really didn't help that the HERO 13 changed a bunch of stuff for the worse, like incompatible api and other issues.