Oh yes! You’re an action junkie, or you love taking very cool POV shots, or wanna document your daily bike ride. Well it’s time for GoPro’s yearly update to their incredibly popular action cam! We used the OLD (yeah, that’s a relative term) for a client’s hidden camera shoot earlier this year to very cool effect.
GoPro Hero 3+
So what has this new model going for it?
- Battery Life. One of the biggest complaints has been the close to unusable battery life. Reports have pinned battery life from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours on a charge. That’s not the best in class by a leap. Can you say Black Magic Pocket Cam anyone? There are some solutions to this, starting from GoPro’s suggestion to go through a full cycle of charging and discharging each NEW battery 3 times. One other solution is to pre-order a battery powered cage. This unique product promises around 5+ hours of battery life. It utilizes a standard Canon EOS LP-E6 battery to do the heavy work. The only drawback of this, is it does not weather proof the whole assembly. Enter the GoPro Hero 3+. It now has a promised 30% longer battery life.
- Low Light Performance. Go Pros have never been what you could call a low light king, but with each iteration, the boys at San Mateo have gotten more and more light sensitive. This new version again ups the ante with even a more sensitive offering
- Form Factor. Each GoPro has gotten progressively smaller, and the GoPro Hero3+ is no exception. They’ve managed to cram more and more into a smaller and smaller casing. This years version is stated as 20% lighter and smaller in dimensions! Perhaps next year it’ll be able to mountable onto a cockroach. All your existing GoPro Hero3 accessories should still work without a hitch.
- WiFi Functions. Apparently the WiFi inner workings have been boosted 4 fold. That includes range up to 600ft, and an a much needed close to real time remote view. The last offering in our experience was marginal to say the least. We experienced dropped signals, unpredictable triggering via the app, all in all an unsatisfying experience for this feature set. I sincerely hope that the 3+ brings production ready Wifi to the mix. Having the 1 second latency will certainly help for quicker framing and triggering.
- Imaging. Low light improvements are promised, and while I’m sure it’s no Canon 5D Mk III, any improvements would be welcomed. There are even wider views with a new ‘SuperView’. How this pans out, we’ll know once we get our hands on this little black beauty. As always, the quality of imaging has been beefed up to have a further 33% increase in sharpness, and double the reduction in artifacting. Once we start seeing real world samples, we will determine how good this is.
- Photo Burst Mode. The GoPro3+ can now shoot 30FPS in full 12MP resolution. What does this mean exactly? Well, if you only need a few seconds of video, (3 maximum to be precise), you essentially have a 4000×3000 resolution video! Very cool possibilities for creative use here.
The GoProHero3+ is available on their Website, and is starting to be sold at your favourite retailers. Pricing on the existing GoProHero3 has been dropping and also has been available at a lower price around the interwebs. I’d recommend skipping the Silver editions and going right for the Black editions.
Here’s some epic footage just released yesterday from GoPro.
[su_youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wbvpOIIBQA” width=”600″]
