Something a bit different here. My camera was destroyed by the dog so I decided to replace it with an Action cam. I have to say that it is a good replacement for my old Olympus TG-6 and it takes excellent still and video shots. The only downside is the wide angle default lens which is great for video but not so good for still shots. This isn’t a problem as its so easy to crop images to act like a zoom which have incredible detail.
The initial user experience wasn’t so good. The screen protectors would not come off cleanly and it took me ages to remove them and I was worried I would scratch the screens doing so. The second stressful factor was that the camera had to be updated before use. Firstly, you have to figure out how to open the door to insert the battery and SD card. This is not obvious. Secondly you get an error saying that the battery is too low to update so you have to connect to a USB power source. This update is not super straightforward and easy to do but eventually works fine. There are many steps and the software to do this often reported errors and that it was unable to find the camera messages. The whole process took about 20 minutes. My next complaint is that when charging from your computer there is no indication of charging progress. It simply has a message stating “USB connected”. GoPro states “This can take up to 4 hours if the computer is used and up to 2 hours if a USB wall charger is used”. GoPro states to use an USB wall charger that outputs 5V and 1A (5V 2A recommended for HERO5 and newer cameras). Alternatively, you can use a computer USB port. Seriously they should include a 2A charger with this just like they should include a paper user manual. It is not just GOPRO that is guilty of this as it seems to be an industry wide policy. Such chargers seem to be less than $10 on Amazon but you don’t know this when you buy your camera and shipping is around $7 on such items. All the chargers in my house do not indicate what their rate is. I am not convinced my PC was charging at all as the battery indication when I unplugged it was less than when I started the update process and the charge indication goes down when saving photos.
I am not impressed by the battery, SD card and USB door, It is extremely fiddly to open and without reading the online help not something you could figure out on your own except for chance. Having said that I have got used to it,
Onto more complaints. When you hook up your camera to your PC to get the photos and videos it doesn’t do it like all my other cameras and simply show the sd card, It shows it in some weird way (MTP Client Disk Volume) that doesn’t give you the normal options such as “Open With”, I also found that trying to delete a file with file manager just caused it to hang and eventually crash.
I am very pleased with the Video and Photo quality which is after all what I bought this for. Stabilization is also excellent. My only slight criticism is that auto WB seems a tad focused on the blue end of the spectrum and some images can look a little washed out straight from the camera. It seems a little over exposed. It can be easily fixed in post and with a bit of experimentation in pro mode I bet it can in the camera too. Finding Pro mode gives a ton of options and tweaks to make your pictures and Videos really pop. It seems to go into video mode when taking selfies in Photo mode occasionally. I haven’t figured out why it does this but it isn’t a problem as when you screen capture a single frame from this video it looks stunning. It really does take good pictures and videos. The lack of a decent zoom is simply not a problem as it is possible to crop stuff without losing any real Quality.
I have to say I used the camera on an overcast day and the exposure and White balance was perfect with Auto settings. It seems to depend on the weather and subject a lot.
On the whole I am really happy with it
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