Over a year ago I decided to buy the new GoPro Hero 10 Black to take on holiday to the Peak District and since then I have had loads of use out of it. Here are some of my thoughts on the action camera and if it’s worth buying, or would you be better off just using your smartphone.
Main features
The main thing I noticed at first was how many settings there are to play with. This can be quite daunting but the preset modes help to figure out exactly which mode to use for different things. Some of the presets include Standard, Cinematic and Activity. The standout feature is that you can film in up to 5.3K/60fps or 4K/120fps so you get get crystal clear and smooth footage as well as being able to slow clips right down and still capture loads of detail. These settings are something that change when you select the different presets, or you can create your own mode and customise the resolution and many other settings exactly how you want them. It also has technology called HyperSmooth built in which means that even if the camera is strapped to your bike going down a bumpy bike track the footage will be smooth and high quality. You can also change the view from wide angle through to linear depending on how wide you want the field of view to be.
Time-lapse
Time-lapse and time-warp are really cool features. Time-lapse lets you record things like sunsets, stars moving in the night sky or even just clouds moving quickly in the sky. The camera has to be still for this so should be on a solid surface or tripod. Time-warp is designed to speed up things like walking. So you can walk for miles and the video clip would be sped up to a few seconds. This is perfect for if you want to film something like a long car journey. This mode also includes stabilisation so you can hold the camera and the footage won’t be distorted.
Subscription
If you go with a subscription you get unlimited storage of photos and videos on the cloud through the GoPro Quik app. When you want to backup your files you can either wireless connect to your phone to download them or connect the camera straight to the cloud to backup. Having the subscription also means that you get discounts on purchases on the GoPro store for things like mounts to attach the camera to anything from a bike to a car. Depending on what package you buy it may come with accessories. Along with many other clips and attachments, mine came with the “shorty” (picture below) which can be used as a tripod or folded to use as a selfie stick type accessory. It also came with the magnetic swivel clip which is useful to stick it to metal items or clip onto things like a hat to film point of view.
GoPro Quik
Once your footage is downloaded to the app you can edit everything together to create a movie. The edit features are really cool and you can create different affects and transitions between clips as well as adding music. Some more professional videographers will probably find it easier to download the footage and use different editing software, but the Quik app is great for beginners. However, it does have it’s problems and sometimes gets stuck backing up media to the cloud and often needs to be reset for it to work again. However, after a recent update this hasn’t happened again. Here’s a video I made using the Hero 10 and the Quik app:
Battery life
In terms of battery life GoPro claim different battery usage based on what mode you are filming in, but for standard HD footage you should expect it to last around 2 hours. I would highly recommend that you get a package including an additional battery and always have a spare one charged up with you as it can wear out quicker than expected, especially when filming time-lapses. You can also get the Enduro battery which lasts longer in temperatures below -10°C.
Is it worth buying the new Hero 10?
I would say it definitely is a step above what you can record on a smartphone. One thing to consider is the Hero 8 and Hero 9 do still come with some great features and would be perfect for most cases, unless you want something with more advanced features like 5.3K/60fps and 4K/120fps video so it just depends on what you are looking for really. But I would highly recommend the Hero 10 and it will not disappoint. Also it’s worth considering the fact that at the time of writing this GoPro have just released the Hero 11.
