RFI: GoPro (2021 edition)

[jc000]

Who here has significant GoPro experience? My 10 year old son wants one for general screwing around: blowing stuff up (supervised!), riding bikes, underwater antics, doing dumb stuff with his friends, making silly home movies. He's obviously pretty young, but does currently shoot and edit a good amount of video (with his iPod) and is quite creative. He may end up using a chest mount at some point.

It looks like the two most recent releases are the Hero9 and the Max. I'm sure both possess capabilities way beyond my understanding, but was hoping someone on here might be able to distill down what one would want to look for and which will be the most futureproof. I really have no idea about any of this stuff (was still getting Netflix DVDs delivered a month or so ago) so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[jc000]

Anyone?

[TheRoland]

I run an older GoPro (a 2017 Hero 5 Black) for shooting and non-shooting stuff. It's fine. The newer ones have similar problems (short battery life, clunky bluetooth/wifi) but higher resolutions and some wizz-bang features like live streaming (not for me) and fancy stabilization (don't need it for my activities).

They work great but I don't think you're missing out on anything by going back a few versions. I don't even use my highest framerate and resolution by 2017 standards, because the resulting files are too big to easily edit.

Buy the cheap ones and spend the difference on spare batteries and mounts.

[EMC]

I can speak to the hero 9 some as I just got one. So far with the latest firmware update I haven't seen any issues of significance other than if you want to do some serious video editing of the highest quality 5k format and your home PC/laptop/phones are older hardware you will run into challenges with HEVC codecs performing on older processors. Also some of the higher quality formats set to highest bit rate take up a ton of disk space.

That said it will record fine in 1080p or 4k with standard bitrates set and run fine on the older hardware too.

Pretty fun gadget. I have been helmet mounting it for skiing and bought a chest mount for mountain biking next spring.