GoPro Hero 9 Black
GoPro wants you to be heroes at home this year with the new Hero 9 Black, but is the action camera different enough to be a home run?
We suspect that not many people would have had a particularly adventure-packed year in 2020, but GoPro said their sales fared reasonably well thanks to users getting creative with their action cameras at home. And so, it makes sense that the Hero 9 Black design is leaning into this new style of content creation, with major updates like a new selfie screen, a bigger battery, web camera capabilities and a larger overall profile all benefiting at-home users.
While the Hero 8 Black had a front facing, e-ink screen that showed you recording duration, battery life and storage space, the Hero 9 Black updates this to a 1.4-inch full colour LCD display. The front facing screen is a really handy feature when framing shots of yourself and it can be adjusted to show a cropped full screen or full image widescreen, depending on how interested in the background you are, but it does have a bit of lag and only hits about 5 fps at sub-1080p.
With slightly fewer constraints on the form factor there’s room for a 40 percent bigger 1,720mAh battery that gives the device a 30 percent longer lifespan, on average (depending on the shooting mode). The battery life is a welcome feature since we found that there just wasn’t enough juice on the hero 8 black to do any more than a couple of hours in time lapse shooting modes or 50 minutes of continuous high res shooting, but it should also benefit anyone using the device in cold conditions (which supposedly drains battery life faster).
GoPro hasn’t released an update to it’s Max 360 camera this year, instead choosing to make a swappable ultrawide lens available to the Hero 9 Black, for anyone wanting a ridiculously wide shooting space. This new Max Lens Mod arrived in October and costs $159.95 which is reasonable considering it gives you a 155 degree field of view and access to some enhanced shooting modes like ultrawide on-camera horizon levelling.
There have even been some updates to the camera tech, including a new 23.6MP sensor that’s capable of shooting at a maximum of 5K 30fps, with improvements to HDR photography and a new generation of Hypersmooth 3.0 digital stabilisation. On its own the resolution bump won’t make a massive difference to your videos, but it does make zoom better for stills and the extra shooting space helps make the advanced stabilisation features possible.
While the standalone price of the device is more expensive at $699.95 than the Hero 8 Black at launch, if you’re happy to sign up for an included one-year GoPro subscription that includes discounted accessory prices, unlimited cloud storage and full camera replacement warranty, it’ll actually reduce the total price to $559.95 for a decent overall launch-price cut.
Joel Burgess