Review | GoPro Hero9 Black review: action camera/webcam has 5K resolution, a new front screen and offers amazing video grabs
- The Hero9 Black has a front-facing selfie screen, better image stabilisation and a detachable lens cover
- Its 5K resolution allows for amazing photo grabs from videos and 20-megapixel stills
The coronavirus pandemic has made more of us point cameras at our faces. Typically they have been webcams for videoconferencing with friends, family and colleagues. But let’s be honest, we were all taking selfies and conducting video calls long before Covid-19.
Cue the Hero9 Black (US$349.98), the first GoPro action camera to work out of the box as a webcam and to include a front-facing screen for framing yourself in the shot.
Add a new sensor, a removable lens guard and some of GoPro’s most effective image stabilisation software, and the Hero9 Black is quite the package. However, is it too powerful – and too expensive – for the average user?
Design and hardware
It may be styled in the same matt black casing – waterproof down to 33ft (10 metres) – as previous flagship GoPro products, but there’s something all new about the design of the Hero9 Black.
There is a first for the brand; a 1.4-inch colour LCD screen. It’s there to help vloggers and selfie takers place themselves a shot with accuracy, and it works really well.
The front-facing screen is a 4:3 shape when the Hero9 Black records in widescreen, but you can choose to have it display either a full screen version or a preview with black bars above and below.
At 71mm x 55mm x 33.6mm and 158g, it’s slightly larger and heavier than the Hero8 Black, largely because it contains a 30 per cent bigger battery, rated at 1,720mAh. Partly that’s to drive a new sensor, but that extra power also powers a larger rear touch screen display and – according to GoPro – improves Hero9 Black’s performance in extreme cold weather.
The final physical innovation is the lens.
The latest entertainment tech is made for pandemic viewing
Slightly narrower angle than on previous models, this one comes with a removable lens cover. It is primarily for attaching GoPro’s Max Lens Mod, an add-on lens slated for sale in October that will enable an ultra-wide-angle 155-degree field of view and the ability to rotate the camera through 360 degrees and keep the horizon locked.
It’s probably going to be for specialist videographers only.
Software and features
All action cameras now shoot in 4K, but the Hero9 Black’s new sensor takes it to 5K. That may not sound like much of a change, but look at it this way; 4K is eight megapixels and 5K is 14.7 megapixels. It’s a huge step up in quality, but also in file size.
Sure, it fills up a microSD card quickly, but as well as allowing better looking close-up zooms that extra detail brings to life a genuinely valuable feature – photo grabs from video. The Hero9 Black’s ability to snap still photos in 20 megapixels is impressive, but it’s also really easy to grab 14.7 megapixels photos from a 5K video.
If that’s useful, the rest of the Hero9 Black’s new features are little more than tweaks to previous innovations; its image stabilisation software is now called Hypersmooth 3.0, while TimeWarp 3.0 allows filming of a handheld time-lapse that can revert to real time midway through for a quick piece-to-camera.
The Hero9 Black also has a HDR Night Lapse mode for taking time-lapse videos of the night sky.
Performance and battery life
It does feel slightly larger than previous GoPros, but not in a bad way. As well as being physically bigger, its buttons protrude more. The result is that it’s easier to hit stop and go while wearing gloves. For active GoPro users planning on using the Hero9 Black while skiing, snowboarding or cycling, that’s a win.
So is the longer-lasting battery, though only if the 5K mode is used with care. It’s great to be able to take grabs from 5K video, but the Hero9 Black only captures 5K in 30 frames per second (fps) or the more cinematic 24fps.
Panning shots can look jumpy, which is why the 4K 60fps mode remains more useful. In fact, a lot of videographers would prefer that GoPro innovated by allowing video capture in 4K 120fps, not 5K 30fps.
Resolutions aside, the Hero9 Black is mostly a joy to use and its footage contains plenty of colour, contrast and detail. It has plenty of digital zoom options, and its Hypersmooth 3.0 is impressive.
There’s also “boost” feature for when the going gets really jumpy, which adds a dreamlike smoothness. It’s almost like having a gimbal built in, though we found that the horizon levelling feature – which happens in-camera – was rather slow to adapt to a change in the camera’s orientation.
The touch screen on the back also disappointed – it’s just not sensitive enough – and we had to rely on the (excellent) smartphone app to make tweaks to the settings.
The Hero9 Black is GoPro’s best stills camera yet, with some useful Raw, HDR and SuperPhoto modes as well as a manual mode that allows photographers to go all the way up to a shutter speed of 30 seconds and ISO 6400.
Conclusion
Do you need the very latest action camera? The Hero9 Black’s front-facing camera is here to help GoPro challenge the DJI Osmo Action and Akaso Brave 7 LE among vloggers, and though there’s much more to it than that, it does feel like a series of niche features have been added.
Lucky, then, that the Hero9 Black also deserves status as a great camera for photos, with the 5K grab mode meaning you can film an event and easily extract the exciting bits. After all, isn’t that what an action camera is for?
