UKC

Anyone own one of the new £99 GoPros? I'm tempted to get one for skiing and general messing about. I briefly owned a GoPro HD Hero 2 a couple of years back but it was super-flaky right out of the box and failed completely after a day or two. I was not too keen on the video that produced, it was awful in anything close to low light. Obviously the Hero 4 is way better (and hopefully more reliable) but how does the cheap model stack up?

In reply to Oujmik:

My son has just bought one. Specs and initial tests say it's almost as good as the more expensive ones, it appears to have a few fewer options in some areas. Low light performance is poor - but that was fully expected and it's not why you buy a GoPro.

The studio software used to process the videos appears quite heavy-weight which is giving us a few issues as he needs it to run on one of our cast-off laptops (he's off to Nicaragua on a circus teaching tour so a posh laptop isn't appropriate) but it seems to be rather demanding - even for a video editing suite.

I'll post back in a few days with our test results.

In reply to csambrook:

A little update. We still haven't had a chance to fully test the camera performance other than to take a stop-frame slow-mo and a very short test clip. The software however has had lots of time spent on it (grrr.....). It turns out that the supporting software "gopro studio" is an editor and a helper program which assists with getting clips off the camera. That little helper starts on computer boot and runs every 2 seconds to see if a camera has been connected, on an old laptop it takes 80% of the CPU for about 1 second. All of which leaves the PC pretty much unusable for anything, thanks GoPro. Fortunately you don't actually need the helper so you can disable it and get your PC back.

The studio software is fairly clunky and doesn't do much but it's OK for a quick and dirty edit or to convert the .mp4 files into something other editors can handle. The only thing which is really special about it is that it has a tool to remove the fish-eye which is characteristic of the GoPro.

Testing properly this weekend so I'll get back in a few days.

In reply to csambrook:

Thanks for the update... for such an affordable version of the most popular video camera, this camera doesn't have much written about it online. I don't mind about the software, I'm not sure I've ever installed the bundled software with any bit of electronics. Will be interesting to see how your videos turn out.

In reply to Oujmik:

Couple of my videos from the new cheap GoPro...

youtube.com/watch?v=kpqgayNosFo&

youtube.com/watch?v=SQQJ5v1z8qA&

Both using the bundled software (but neither using the remove fish eye option). I have a Core2Duo iMac and it takes ages for the final render, whereas the i5 MacBook Pro is faster, but less hard disc and tends to get shut off, being a laptop. Think the next one will be done on iMovie to see if that's a better way.

The above both rendered into 720 pixels high movies. Very impressed with the raw video quality. The "on the net" videos tend to suffer from the poor broadband around here.