GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK REVIEW: SMOOTH OPERATOR
GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK REVIEW: SMOOTH OPERATOR
It’s that point of the year again. Fall brings us, alongside
decorative gourds, new GoPros. Other brands like DJI are threatening to eat GoPro’s
lunch, recently, while the past few revisions of GoPro’s signature camera have
largely been iterative. So with the new $400 Hero 8 Black, GoPro took some
risks. A number of these risks pay off, while others make me a touch nervous.
Let’s start with the body. Since the Hero 5, GoPro cameras
are waterproof up to 33 feet without the necessity of a further housing, but so
as to connect it to anything, you needed to place the camera during a plastic
frame. The frame provided the 2 little loops at rock bottom, which you’d put a
screw through and fasten it to any number of bracket-type things. No more! The
Hero 8 is meant to be frameless. It’s its own built-in loops at rock bottom of
the camera that fold in and out. This is often very convenient, as I even have
several times found myself digging through everything I own to seek out a
frame. The caveat is that you simply do have to tighten the screw down a touch
harder than normal otherwise you may get some wiggle with the camera.
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| GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK REVIEW: SMOOTH OPERATOR |
The redesign makes the Hero 8 slightly thinner than the
naked Hero 7 front to back (28.4mm vs. 33mm), but it’s also slightly wider and
taller (66.3mm by 48.6mm vs. 62.3mm by 44.9mm, respectively). It’s smaller than
the Hero 7 when it’s during a frame, though, and considering you would like the
frame to try to just about anything, internet result's that the Hero 8 may be a
lot more pocketable. One among the ways it achieved this was by making the lens
slightly lower-profile, but the trade-off is that the front lens element is not
any longer removable. Since the Hero 5, you’ve been ready to remove that and
buy an inexpensive replacement if it ever gets scratched or cracked. The new
front lens element is thicker and made with Gorilla Glass, and GoPro claims
that it's twice as impact-resistant. But on my first review unit I managed to
urge a touch nick on the lens, and I’m honestly not even sure how. It wasn’t
enough to ruin the image, but still. The camera being 4.6mm more svelte doesn’t
feel well worth the risk.
The other major physical difference is that there's now only
one big door on the side of the camera that covers your battery, microSD card,
and USB-C port. GoPro will soon be releasing a couple of Mods which will snap
in where the door goes. A Media Mod adds a higher-quality shotgun-style
microphone, a 3.5mm mic port, and two cold shoes. In those cold shoes, you'll
slot a front-facing external monitor (“Display Mod”) or a 200 lumen LED “Light
Mod.” You’ll lose waterproof capabilities when the Media Mod is on (though the
sunshine itself is waterproof and may be used separately from the camera), but
this is often a play to draw in more vlogger types, and that I think it'll
appeal to tons of them. I wasn’t ready to test these accessories, though,
therefore the jury remains out.
I did have an unfortunate incident with the camera,
additionally to the mystery lens scratch. A couple of days ago, I put the Hero
8 on the rear bumper of my van while it had been parked. I accidentally nudged
it off, and it fell onto the dirt road, where it must have hit a small, sharp
piece of gravel. Once I picked it up, the rear screen was totally shattered.
That seemed very weird to me. I’ve found some ways to beat up prior GoPro
cameras, and it always takes tons more to try to real damage. I went back with
a measuring tape and therefore the surface of my bumper is simply 18 inches off
the bottom. GoPro sent me a replacement one to end the review and swore that
mine is that the first they’ve seen with a broken screen. May need just been a
one-off accident. Further testing will tell, and that we will update if we
discover anything.
The other physical thing that worries me is that this GoPro
tends to urge pretty hot. After recording a 15-minute clip at 4K24 with
stabilization, rock bottom of the camera was extremely popular to the touch. I
didn’t have a laser thermometer available, but I held a thermometer thereto and
it read 107.4 degrees F. I attempted it again with stabilization, Wi-Fi, and
GPS disabled and it got up to 112.9. That’s hot! Which was a few minutes after
recording ended, and that’s not an excellent thanks to measure temperature, so I
might suspect that it had been significantly hotter inside. I never had it
fully overheat and pack up, but it’s still troubling, especially if you're shooting
on a hot day.
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I did two battery rundown tests, with the primary in 4K24
linear, HyperSmooth 2.0 on High, plus Wi-Fi and GPS turned on. Therein
power-hungry mode, it lasted 72 minutes. Once I shot at 4K24 Wide, with
everything turned off and therefore the low bit rate setting, it made it 90.5
minutes. I’d call that respectable, but not spectacular.
Overall, i prefer the new design. I’ve always found the
frame to be a pain, so I’m glad to be obviate it. i prefer the new side
entrance , too, as that creates it easier to swap batteries or SD cards without
dismounting the camera. That being said, the marginally smaller footprint may
be a bad trade for the irremovable lens cap. PolarPro and other companies are
going to be making stick-on lens covers (as well as ND filters and such), which
I might definitely recommend you purchase. The warmth issue is concerning, but
I haven’t had one overheat and pack up yet, so for now I’d just advise caution
if you’re getting to be shooting on a hot day.
With the new lens on the Hero 8, GoPro elected to revamp its
auto white balance and color tuning. This is often especially evident in skin
tones, the reds in dirt, the blues within the sky, and greens in leaves.
Overall, the default GoPro color features a punchier, more dramatic look. Skin and
dirt are both warmed significantly, while skies remain super vibrant. Detail is
superb overall. But at an equivalent time, I feel the contrast is pushed a
touch high. Highlights are nearly blown out, while shadows are significantly
darker than they were with the Hero 7. I feel it generally features a nicely
graded look, and pictures looks more lively and cinematic, but I imagine most
DPs will want to use the flat color profile to possess more flexibility in
post.
Because the camera not has got to sit during a frame, GoPro
was ready to move the most mic to the front of the camera, slightly below the
lens. It definitely has the nicest sound for any GoPro since before the Hero 5,
when the built-in waterproofing required that a membrane be added to guard the
mics. Even once I was riding a motorcycle with the mic pointed far away from
me, into the wind, it picked up my voice much better than before. It’s a clear
improvement. I think the Media Mod will perform even better, too.
Last year, with the Hero 7, GoPro introduced its new bitmap
stabilization which it called HyperSmooth. GoPro claimed it gave “gimbal-like”
stabilization, so I tested it against an actual gimbal and yeah, no, sorry. It
had been good, but it wasn’t that good. Amazingly, HyperSmooth 2.0 actually is
approaching gimbal level.
Its wild what proportion bounce and shake this thing can eat
and still make the footage look good. Handheld pans appear as if they were shot
with a Steadicam. I stuck my distribute of a window going 65 mph (don’t worry,
my friend was driving), which made my hand wobble like hell , and therefore the
shot came out looking just like the camera was locked on a crane. I took my
all-terrain bike on a bumpy, rough dirt road, and from the footage, you’d think
it had been paved. It’s a minimum of two levels up from the first HyperSmooth,
which was pretty good.
There are now four options you'll choose for stabilization:
Off, On, High, and Boost. On may be a slight improvement over last year’s
stabilization. High, though, is where the camera really shines. It’s a huge
improvement over last year’s feature and therefore the neatest thing about it's
that it doesn’t crop any longer than the regular on mode (10 percent crop).
It’s pretty amazing. One among the items I actually dinged DJI on in my Osmo
Action cam review was that while the stabilization was excellent, it cropped
the footage dramatically and there was a drop by quality. With the Hero 8, we
still get that nice, wide field of view you would like for action footage. If
you don’t mind a more severe crop, though, you'll turn HyperSmooth to “Boost,”
which narrows the FOV about the maximum amount as DJI’s does, and it stabilizes
the shot even more.
You can use a minimum of some sort of stabilization at every
resolution and frame rate, but you won’t have all of the choices. As an example,
you'll now stabilize 1080p240 for super smooth slow-motion (which wasn’t an
option on the Hero 7, and it's pretty amazing), but you’ll be limited to the on
mode. An equivalent holds true in 4K60, or if you employ the SuperView FOV in
the least. When possible, I’d choose the HyperSmooth 2.0 High mode. If I were
following someone on a snowboard or all-terrain bike, though, where a better
crop doesn’t hurt, I’d use Boost.
All that being said, it still isn’t quite as stable as a
gimbal. HyperSmooth 2.0 High and Boost modes do rather well with pitch and yaw,
but roll may be a bit tougher for it to catch up on , while a gimbal just
swivels its robotic neck to stay the horizon straight. That being said, gimbals
are a pain to use. They’re bulky, they aren’t waterproof, they get disoriented
in high winds, and you would like to stay them charged. The convenience of this
small camera easily outweighs the slight drop by smoothness, and therefore the
result's that I’m finally getting to stop lugging a gimbal around. I’m shocked,
honestly.
GoPro’s in-camera menu system has also gotten tons better
with the Hero 8. The most important improvement in my book is that the addition
of presets. Say you’re wearing the camera on your helmet, then you would like
to modify it to a selfie-stick, then you would like to follow a lover down a
trail. Formerly, you'd need to manually tweak each of the settings for field of
view, frame rate, resolution, and stabilization options whenever you changed.
There’s a replacement burst photography mode called Live
Burst. Once you turn to the present mode, the camera is recording on a cache.
When the instant you’ve been expecting finally arrives, you hit the shutter
button, and therefore the camera captures a three-second clip, also as 1.5
seconds before you pressed the button and 1.5 seconds after. The result's a 4K
clip with 90 separate frames to settle on from. You’ll either begin the one
photo you would like, otherwise you can save the three-second video if you’d
prefer. It’s slick, but three seconds may be a bit short and that I hope GoPro
will add an option for extended Live Bursts.
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TimeWarp (GoPro’s name for a hyperlapse feature) has been
improved, too. TimeWarp 2.0 benefits from the higher stabilization of
HyperSmooth 2.0, but the important innovation here is that within the middle of
shooting the time lapse, you'll tap the rear screen and attend real time. Say
you’re shooting a time lapse while kayaking across a bay and suddenly a pod of
dolphins show up. You’ll tap to shoot them in real time, then tap again to
travel back to time lapse once they’ve passed. The one issue is that, for a few
reason, there’s no sound within the real-time moments. i used to be shooting a
time lapse of a sunset when my friends there started singing happy birthday to
me, I visited real time to capture the instant , then flipped it back to urge
the remainder of the sunset. i used to be bummed once I realized there was no
audio. Now how am I alleged to know if my birthday was, indeed, happy?
Improvements are made to SuperPhoto, which is essentially
GoPro’s name for an intelligent auto mode. generally, the camera reads the
scene a touch better than it did with the Hero 7, and can decide if it should
go HDR or if there’s an excessive amount of movement to form the effect usable.
HDR is slightly improved, too, but I still find that the HDR images look a
touch soft and I’d only use it for scenes with no motion and if you've got a
really steady hand. Really, the simplest option is to shoot in RAW and tweak
your photos later in Lightroom, but if you only want to shoot and post straight
from your phone then SuperPhoto creates a pleasant, usable shot.
Back to movies, the standard of the footage actually takes a
pleasant jump up with GoPro’s highest bit rate yet. When shooting 4K or 2.7K,
you'll prefer to shoot at 100 Mbps. Other action cameras (such as Sony’s) have
shot at that rate for years, but GoPro is doing it within the HEVC h.265 codec,
which packs during a lot more data for the file size. The mixture of HEVC and
100 Mbps is noticeable when watching your videos on a 4K monitor. On the opposite
side of the spectrum, this is often the primary GoPro to ditch 720p since the
first Hero HD. The minimum resolution is now 1080p. This probably won’t
interest most of the people, but I used to be still hoping we’d see an
excellent slo-mo option of 720p480. Sigh.
With the camera comes a replacement GoPro app. the most
important change is that GoPro’s video-editing companion Quik is now built into
the only GoPro app. That’s certainly tons simpler. I’ve always found GoPro’s
apps to be problematic (possibly because I’m on Android), and unfortunately, I
wasn’t ready to test the ultimate build of the new app before this review. What
I can tell you, though, is that the UI feels a touch more intuitive. There’s
now built-in horizon leveling and more options for music, text, and video
templates. GoPro claims it now uses metadata to “better identify meaningful
moments” within the auto-edited videos within the app. I had it cut together a
video from the clips I gathered after a brief surf session, and anecdotally it
looks like it could have picked better highlights. I still had to maneuver tons
of bits around, manually select more interesting highlights, and cut out many
boring moments, so I’m filing this one under Requires Further Testing.
One very nice feature is that you simply can now live-stream
in 1080p. Within the pre-beta version of the app I used to be using, I used to
be only ready to stream to Facebook, but the video did indeed look good when it
came through. YouTube should be supported by the time the camera ships and
hopefully more are going to be added soon (we’re all still waiting on Instagram
to open up its live-streaming).
Overall, the Hero 8 Black’s most impressive thing is its
improved stabilization. It had been good on the Hero 7 — on the Hero 8 it’s
great. HyperSmooth 2.0 in High mode is ultra-smooth while remaining nice and
wide, and that I still don’t know what quite dark magic they wont to keep from
cropping it any longer than last year. The new lens is sharp, and therefore the
added bit rate and peppier color science make your videos look more dramatic
right out of the camera (even if I feel they went a touch heavy on the
contrast). I’m also excited about the Mods, which should make this a good more
versatile camera (though a built-in, front-facing screen like DJI’s would still
be far more convenient).
My biggest concern is that the durability of the body. No
removable lens seems like an error. Yes, Gorilla Glass is tough, but I’ve seen
tons of shattered phone screens made with Gorilla glaze the years. once I asked
GoPro about it, the rep suggested people check out the GoPro Plus subscription
service, which costs $5 a month, but includes free camera replacement with no
questions asked (in addition to another benefits). The corporate is
additionally getting to sell a $20 kit that comes with two screen protectors
and two lens protectors. I didn’t get an opportunity to check this kit, but if
you’re watching the Hero 8, it’s probably not a nasty idea to select this up,
too. But now you’re all-in total is $20 quite the $400 sticker price.
Overall, the Hero 8 Black may be a worthy successor to the
throne. It’s easily getting to be my go-to action camera starting now (at least
until i buy my hands on the GoPro Max during a month or so), and I’m more
likely than ever to use it as a B-camera on upcoming productions. Just wait
until vloggers get their hands on this thing.
AGREE TO CONTINUE: GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK
Every smart device now requires you to comply with a series
of terms and conditions before you'll use it — contracts that nobody actually
reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one among these
agreements. But we started counting exactly what percentage times you've got to
hit “agree” to use devices once we review them since these are agreements most
of the people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.
Since it’s a camera, the GoPro Hero 8 Black doesn’t require
you to comply with any particular terms of service to use. You’ll just turn it
on and put a memory card in it and begin recording footage.
But if you would like to use GoPro’s mobile app, you've got
to comply with GoPro’s terms of service and make a GoPro account. The mobile
app is required to put in any kind of firmware updates, which it’s largely
recommended to try to.
GOPRO HERO 8 BLACK UNBOXING: SMOOTH OPERATOR
Final tally: no mandatory agreements, but an optional one to be used of the app and to put in firmware updates.
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