Offering an updated product once a year ensures hype and sales spikes, but comes with some challenges – the challenges continue to get bigger as the product matures and competitors painting appears. The GoPro HERO11 Black debuted last month, but what do the latest upgrades mean for a company whose value has dropped 90% from its peak just a few years ago?
GoPro announced HERO11 Black and Black Mini in September and sent out a bunch of units for journalists to review, including myself. The search for innovative new features to cram into such a tiny form factor every year must keep tech teams awake as many factors collide to increase the pressure to deliver something appealing. camera buying public attention.
First, there is certainly a limit to how far a product can be reproduced, especially over the length of a 12-month product cycle. The frame rate and bitrate increase gradually as expected. However, what customers are looking for is something that sparks the imagination and opens up new possibilities – something you could argue hasn’t happened in several years.
Before exploring this further and figuring out the future for this action camera maker, here’s a quick recap of the headline features GoPro hopes will convince you to part with your hard earned money. me. If you’ve caught up with the specs, do some scrolling.
What’s New in GoPro HERO11 Black
The standout upgrade is the 1/1.9” sensor which now offers an 8:7 aspect ratio. At 6.4 x 5.6 mm, it is larger than the 6.17 x 4.55 mm sensor used. used in HERO10, and while you’d be forgiven for assuming that action cameras tend to try to scale as much as they can, this new near-square format makes for some interesting options. The impact of the 360 action camera is being felt; you can crop more easily with a variety of formats (think TikTok) and it also facilitates an upgrade to the Horizon Lock feature that keeps your footage rooted in gravity, even as you rotate the camera is fully 360 degrees (up from 45 degrees). That 16:9 letterbox revolves around the 8:7 sensor with almost no cropping, and it won’t be long before other manufacturers follow suit.
The sensor has also allowed GoPro to create HyperView – an upgrade on the SuperView (but presumably a precursor to the upcoming MegaView, SickView and HolyCrapView), which squeezes the 8:7 aspect ratio to 16:9 while maintaining the degree of resolution. 5.3K resolution and offers 4K/120p. Some will love it, some will prefer to stick with its predecessor. The hype in GoPro’s press release claims that it will make your first-person footage “look faster and more epic than you imagined possible,” and they may be right.
The already impressive HyperSmooth stabilization is now version 5.0, so good it seems to have won an Emmy. And there are three new time-lapse features suitable for star trails, light paint and tail lights. Other software tweaks include an “Autoboost” mode, whereby stability settings are decided by HERO11 itself, and there’s an easy user interface mode for those who don’t want to get lost in the menus.
Filmmakers will spot one or two of the above stats: 5.3K/60p, 4K/120p, and 2.7K/240p. You can get 24.7-megapixel photos from video, which I suspect will always feel like a better option than using HERO11 to capture 27-megapixel stills. The last statistic to note is 10-bit color, which will provide a lot more flexibility when it comes to grading.
Ultimately, both consumers and professionals will appreciate the Enduro battery, which has been proven to deliver much better performance.
Amazing? I guess
All of this is impressive, but it’s not amazing. Does it allow users to film from strange angles and in situations where you don’t want to hold the camera? Test. Does it offer an incremental upgrade on a tried and tested product that has been delivering results for nearly two decades? Test.
Like smartphones, the age of revolutionary new features that change the market is behind us. Each iteration is an improvement on ever-improving sensors and competition, evolving year by year and in increasing numbers. Stabilization is, I suppose, the last major addition, providing users with gimbal-like performance in an extremely compact format – something to suit consumers as well as professionals. Eliminating the bounce of a mountain bike is one thing, but it also offers the option to easily create smooth camera movements, and while sharpness and color from these tiny sensors have never been. give it a cinematic feel, which is a huge step forward.
Consumer/Professional Segment
For a decade, I worked for charities, bringing fundraisers down next to skyscrapers in central London. I remember when we started seeing people bet to the top of skyscrapers with GoPros, asking us to strap and tape these flexible cameras to their helmets. Over time, GoPro’s dominance changed as DJI came along, and the multitude of GoPro alternatives – often less than half the price and offering half the video quality but little else – have taken hold. GoPro used to focus on a whole range of consumers: consumers, professionals, and professionals. Today, with competition all over the place and, notably, the proliferation of smartphones, the days of GoPro dominance aren’t what they used to be.
At the pro and pro level, new technology like the 8:7 sensor in the GoPro 11 will make headlines, but bitrate and frame rate are just as important as different manufacturers compete. to produce the best image quality from these tiny sensors. However, for consumers like me, these numbers matter much less; those in the back of a building care less about sharpness when cropping to a 5.3K frame. The stabilization, front-end display, and range of accessories are much more convincing, and unless there’s a killer feature – like the HyperSmooth stabilization introduced in 2018 – there isn’t a huge amount to differentiate GoPro from its competitors, beyond the understanding that this is a company with a proven track record that, to the average consumer, is a recognized brand, hey, perhaps make the best action cameras on the market, so why bother reading more reviews.
In addition, phones are a growing threat. For consumers, there are fewer and fewer reasons to pull action cams instead of phones as phones become waterproof and offer comparable stability. Connectivity prices have improved, and if you already have a device (at least one covered) that does the job, why spend the extra money on a GoPro? Not long ago, if you wanted to capture impromptu footage of your kids at a water park, you needed a GoPro. No more.
Additionally, the phone now offers features that action cameras can’t match thanks to multiple lenses, powerful processing, depth mapping, and computational photography. The low-light performance on the latest phones is far superior to the HERO11, and the cinematic modes are delivering shots we thought were impossible. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting close. If GoPro can blur the background when doing vlog, options like new version released Sony Z1-VF would be much less attractive. Unfortunately for GoPro, even if they can equip next year’s HERO12 with the A15 Bionic chip found in the iPhone 14, they’ll still need to mount another lens or two to be able to calculate depth (all) However, unless the next AI shows that it can guess the depth without a depth map, give it another 5 years).
In an effort to appeal to the various niches of the market, GoPro offers Creator Toolkit, refreshed for HERO11. You get a Volta handle that gives you more battery life and easier control, along with a small light and a microphone. I wish I could do more vlogs on action cams, but I just can’t. The footage is incredibly sharp, and like many others, the GoPro only comes out of the bag when the weather is doing something nasty and I need to mount it somewhere. On the other hand, my iPhone 11 works pretty well, is always within reach, and is much less difficult to set up.
The Last Threat: Offenses
Aside from competitor action cameras and various smartphone manufacturers, the final threat: action camera variants. Those reputable bettors I helped attach GoPros and clone GoPros to their helmets throughout the 2010s, all the better with a 360 camera. Countless magical moments have been lost over the years. due to an action camera with a bad tilt angle. Of course, once you’ve pressed on your footage to get the frame you want, the resolution drops dramatically – but does that matter? For anyone producing premium 360 content, absolutely. For the goofs who want a great view of them descending a London skyscraper? Absolutely not.
GoPro, HERO11 and Future
What’s worth remembering here is that it’s only been a few years since rumors of GoPro’s demise ran rampant. Not long after being valued at $10 billion after debuting on the US stock market, many were concerned that the company was circling the exit route. GoPro’s stock price peaked at $93.85 in October 2014 and has since dropped to as low as $4.80. Somehow, the market failed to set a price in a notoriously competitive market, combined with some poor decisions from GoPro itself. DJI has entered the market, phones becoming waterproof and other pretty little gadget cameras are having an impact on GoPro’s share of sales. Then the Karma drone launched in 2016 proved an irreversible disaster, leading to a complete recall.
Action cameras are no longer redundant and sales will continue, but the appeal of these specific devices to every market is gone as the feature set is no longer unique. While I won’t pass up GoPro to surprise us all and come up with something amazing next year, the company has suffered and the stock price is currently $5.13 for find that they will need to continue to diversify their offerings to ensure success. The direct-to-consumer sales, subscription model, bundled cloud storage, and Quik Auto-Highlight reels the company has set up – heavily encouraged by some smart pricing – could prove to be what is needed for the company in the long run, deeper customer engagement for its brand and ecosystem.
Looks like another 360 camera will be near the corner. Back in 2019, I played with the GoPro MAX 360 (dropped it three stories on our first day of testing and scratched the lens. Oops). I was very impressed. Curiously, 360 cameras have come a long way since then, but GoPro has yet to bring anything new to the market. I asked GoPro if there were any plans and got the following response: “We continue to be thrilled with the MAX’s reception and performance, and the sphere market is certainly a valuable one. for us.”
Inference
If you need a new action camera, GoPro HERO11 Black is a definite choice. For filmmakers, it offers some compelling upgrades, but for consumers it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking and many would be better off with a new case for their phone. includes several mounting options or a 360 camera offering much more versatility due to the small form factor.
