GoPro Hero 10 Black Pricing and Overview
Hero 10 Black. Now I’ve been using this camera over the last month a ton, so I’ve got a pretty good feel for how it works, where it works well, where it doesn’t work so well…all the caveats all that kind of goodness. And because this video is definitely not sponsored in any way, shape, or form, I’m gonna tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. But I‘m gonna do it through real-world usage and tons of comparison footage, and actual real footage over the past month to show you how it stacks up against the Hero 9, as well as their competitors from DJI and Insta360. Now before we get into all those 16 new features let’s simply talk price. The price has actually increased by $50. It is now at $399 as opposed to $349. However, that’s with the GoPro subscription service. If you don’t have that, or don’t sign up for that, then it’s $100 more at $499, as opposed to last year with the Hero 9 at $449. Also, a fun fact in case you’re wondering how to tell a Hero 10 apart from a Hero 9 [from the front], it’s simple: The blue text the blue Hero 10 on the side, as well as the blue text on the front means it’s Hero 10.
1# Frame Resolution Increases for GoPro Hero 10 Black
So first up on the list is the increased frame rates. So in a nutshell everything’s kind of doubled, so essentially 5K-30FPS (so 30 frames per second) at 5k, became a 5K-60[FPS]. 4K60 before, became 4K120. 2.7K120 became 2.7K240. However, it didn’t quite go all the way to 480[FPS]. GoPro says they’re not quite capable yet in terms of software where they are on this chipset. Maybe down the road but not today. Now just a quick note before we go too much further if you are finding this video interesting or useful, simply whack that like button at the bottom there. It really helps out **Please 🙂 I even did manual closed captions for ya*** this video and the channel quite a bit.
#2 GoPro Hero 10 Black GP2 Chipset
Talking of that chipset, that’s probably the biggest technical change with the Hero 10 Black. It’s now got their new GP2 silicon. Essentially GoPro developed their own silicon back a few years ago, the GP1 chipset, and they’ve carried that through to the Hero 9. But GoPro says that they basically start to outgrow the capabilities of that chipset. Whereas the new GP2 chipset allows them higher frame rates, faster responsiveness, and a boatload more things we’ll talk about throughout this video. GoPro also says that GP2 chipset should last them a few years so they’re going to grow into that over time. Both with increases to hardware and new cameras, with their annual release cycle. As well as firmware updates including one coming in just November that will add some additional frame rates too.
#3 23.6MP Photo in All Modes GoPro Hero 10 Black
Next up is a pretty big change to photo modes which is the increased resolution to 23.6 megapixel for all photo modes previously you only got that if you shot raw which had a bunch of kind of considerations you had to think about versus now you can shoot in basically everything except for live bursts and live burst is like live photos on ios or motion sales on android so those are really actually more just videos and they are true photos you can see a couple shots here side by side between the hero9 and the hero 10 taking those photos i’ve also put a link to a bunch of this stuff in the description down below if you want to download the actual files themselves both raw and jpeg to see how they look now at this point in the video if things are feeling a little bit fast-paced for you then definitely check out my full beginner’s guide video it’s linked up in the corner there somewhere and that basically takes you from the unboxing all the way through setup and then full usage of the hero 10 essentially starting off with a bunch of the basics and then ramping into a bunch of the tips and tricks for someone that uses a gopro every single day and also someone that has used the hero 10 i figure there’s a bunch of little things that you might find useful.
#4 Hydrophobic Lens Cover GoPro Hero 10 Black
Next up is a change i’ll make a lot of beach folks happy which is a new hydrophobic coating on the lens itself now if you used a gopro for a long time you know the best way to ensure that droplets don’t form on the lens is to just simply lick it and then as you’re taking your camera in and out of the water the water droplets won’t form on the lens but with the hero 10 they put a hydrophobic coating on it which means the water droplets should just run off and thus far in my testing it holds pretty true like water does not stick to it i’m pretty happy with it now one funny note though is gopro says please don’t lick the hero 10 lens in fact if you lick the hero 10 lens it does the opposite and removes that coating the good news is if you do have a hero 9 the lens covers between the 9 and the 10 are completely interchangeable so you can actually buy the 10 lens cover by itself put it on the 9 and get all those same benefits.
#5 Wired Camera Offloads for GoPro Hero 10 Black
The next feature is arguably my favorite feature on their hero 10 which is wire downloads that means that you can take a cable from it the gopro hero 10 Black straight to your phone and download the videos and photos at full speed as opposed to having to deal with wireless i have found that incredibly useful getting a boatload of footage at the end of the day or just even sifting through a boatload of footage and not having to deal with like wi-fi stuff it just works every single time and it’s so so fast so we met the gopro to ask whether or not this functionality is coming to the hero 9 and the answer is yes it actually is in fact today right this second if you download the new gopro quick app it’ll work with the hero 9 to download from usb via usb you can see that right here working just fine with the new gopro quick app there’s no firmware update required actually uses the existing firmware just opens up new stuff with the gopro app itself now setting up that wireless connectivity is actually pretty easy but you will need an additional cable than what came in the box so if you’ve got an apple device with a lightning port then you will need the lightning to usb camera connector gopro recommends using the official one it’s only like 12 or 15 bucks so i’d go with that it worked just fine for me and then you take the usb cable that came in the box plug those two things together and attach it to the phone and within a couple seconds it’ll show all your footage right there on android you need a simple usbc to usbc connector uh take one end plug it in the gopro the other end plug it in the phone and you’re good to go there as well i’ve got links to both of those cables by the way down in the description just in case you want to be sure that you got the exact correct cable
#6 Livestreaming with HyperSmooth
Next up is that gopro has enabled hyper smooth in live streaming previously there was like electronic stabilization for live streaming both the hero8 and hero9 but it was super super old like four camera versions old so it didn’t really stabilize at all which means that people watching your stream were probably getting a bit motion sickness now they’re using the full hyper smooth 4.0 stack for the live stream side which means that both the streamed video as well as a recorded video have the complete stabilization in it.
#7 Faster WiFi Downloads
Next well i talked about the new wired feature there’s also improved wireless features as well gopro’s claiming 30 faster and that’s of course super useful given you probably just doubled all your frame rates up to 60 or 120 frames or 240 frames per second which effectively doubles your file size now we hinted at.
#8 HyperSmooth 4.0 Leveling
The next feature a little bit earlier which is the new hypersmooth 4.0 hypersmooth is basically gopro’s branding for their stabilization side of it and 4.0 implying this is the fourth generation of it uh the biggest ticket item in this is that they’ve removed some of the barriers especially around the horizon leveling horizon leveling means that when i hold up the camera like this and tilt it like this it’ll keep actually the image straight and stable so it looks like it’s completely level to you in the past for some of those modes to support up to 45 degrees a tilt yet other modes only support about 27 degrees of tilt gopro says that in the hero 10 they now go to 45 degrees of tilt for every single mode in the camera now while horizon leveling is super cool for a lot of scenarios there are some cases where i don’t prefer for example mountain biking horizon leveling just takes out the motion of it and just doesn’t make it feel as good but of course you can choose whether to enable or disable it it’s always an option on the camera so it’s there if you need it and then you can disable it when you don’t want it now as you’re probably figuring out by now almost all these new features have to do with speed and responsiveness and almost everything’s tied back to the new gp2 chip and that’s true as well for.
#9 More Responsive Touchscreen
The next new feature is improved responsiveness of the back touch screen itself now in using these cameras side by side over last month for comparison footage it became super obvious that the hero 10 is definitely faster on the back touchscreen than the hero9 almost every single time i went to use it side by side i’d be waiting on the hero 9 versus the hero 10 was like yep i’m i’m done ready to go so some of the features like the improved touchscreen aren’t really about things like frame rates and crazy new features but just about making the core stuff work a lot better.
#10 Local Tone Mapping in Videos
Next is new local tone mapping in videos and 3d noise reduction previously gopro did local tone mapping in their super photo mode but actually not on the video side and what this means is that basically when you get high contrast or high brightness levels and low brightness levels in the same frame it can figure out which portions of the frame should be exposed at different levels a really simple example of showing this side-by-side with the hero 9 is i’m going through this treed section on this hike and you can see there are super bright areas like this glacier up above on the mountain as well as really dark areas like the trees and the shrubs down below as i move the camera around you can see how the hero 10 handles that just a little bit better than the hero9 does gopro says that’s exaggerated even more in low light conditions where you still might have a bright sun or bright object up there and then it’s really really dark and allow us to frame like a sunset or things like that
#11 Front Screen Faster
Next up is another simple responsiveness one which is improved frame rates on the front screen itself now you may remember with the hero9 when they introduced the front screen after copying the dji osmo action it was super slow in latent at higher frame rates so if you had 4k or 5k uh recorded what you actually saw on the front screen the one that you look at itself was a really low frame rate only like three to five frames per second so it’s kind of hard to use it sometimes because it just seemed like watching bad internet tv or something versus with the hero 10 gopro says it’ll match the recorded frame rate and that’s true it looks completely buttery smooth in the hero 10 compared to side by side with the hero 9. and while many folks might think of the front screen for vloggers and such it’s honestly just super useful for taking selfies ensuring that you’re actually in the frame maybe i spin it back around again still see the back of the display whenever you want and then bring it back to selfie style without pressing any buttons at all.
#12 Higher Res Still Frames
Next gopro has increased the resolution for frames grabbed from a video meaning if you’re taking a still from a video it’s up to 19.6 megapixels now versus previously it was at 12 to 14 megapixels gopro says it’s because they’re finding more people are just simply taking videos of things and then taking the stills out of them as opposed to taking true photos and i actually find that true myself these days with the resolution of the video being as high as it is and the frame rates being as high as they are it’s just way easier to simply take a video of something and then grab the exact still the exact frame that i want as opposed to trying to capture that moment by pressing the button and getting the photo and missing the photo and all that kind of fun stuff so for me that’s a feature i really appreciate now
#13 But not for LiveBurst
One minor caveat on that that was that’s not supportive for a gopro’s live burst which is like their live photo thing that i talked about earlier because again that’s just taking a video of something it’s not actually taking photos of it okay so rounding home here with.
#14 Better Low Light Performance
Three more categories to go we’ve got low light performance or rather reduced noise in low light performance so increased performance and low light performance gopro says in particular they focused on 4k 30 and 4k 24 here and reducing the noise in that they didn’t know it’s not for like pitch black scenarios i think most action cameras gopros included it’s fair to say mostly suck there but in terms of low light performance you can see just a couple samples here side by side between the hero 9 and the hero 10 as well as the osmo action and the insta 360 1r speaking of those samples i’ve got entire samples video of comparison footage linked up there somewhere you should be able to find that and dig into all sorts of samples across all sorts of scenarios to see how the cameras perform both against the existing hero 9 as well as other competitors on the market.
#15 GoPro Mod Compatibility
So about now you may be asking what about the mods uh and gopro says the hero 10 supports all the mods mostly so in this case it starts off the media mod is supported out of the box today the light mod is supported out of the box today because it doesn’t technically do anything with the camera it just sits on top of it however the gopro max lens mod though is not supported out of the box but instead can be a firmware update in november that’s a pretty big disappointment for me personally because i use the maxlens mod for almost everything these days it’s just so stable and so easy to use but still i guess i can wait like two more months to get to November gopro says the reason for that is with the new gp2 chipset they’ve had to rework a ton of code behind the scenes and they simply haven’t yet got the max lens mod to the point where they want to be on the hero 10. which brings up the question of will gopro unlock higher frame rates on the max lens mod for the hero 10. the answer to that is to stay tuned for later on this year.
#16 Bucket of Randomness
Okay so for this last item here i’ve got an entire bucket list of like odds and ends things i probably could have made this like a 20 new things to no video but instead i’m just going to grab my phone and rip through them number one physical battery remains the same as the hero9 packaging wise it’s the same as the hero 9 also except they remove the plastic hanging tag which makes it even more environmentally friendly with the hero 9 packaging the package was actually like the soft shell case itself and then just cardboard and full recycled so they got rid of the plastic and now it’s more friendly everything else beyond that remains essentially the same all the new features we saw last year are here as well and that’s also true for some of the quirks for example if you’re using your phone to preview the video you’ve got this you know mounted somewhere uh once you hit record you can’t see the preview stream anymore and while gopro won’t comment on why they got removed from the hero 9 and hero 10 and compared to past cameras the grapevine is pretty strong as saying that’s a patent court case thing that’s still ongoing and finally it’s worthwhile noting that gopro says in november they’re going to add a new firmware update that will go ahead and increase the capabilities of this from a frame rate standpoint, so stay tuned for that as well okay so there you go a complete look at the new gopro hero 10 Black i mean clearly it’s the best gopro yet but i mean hope so right you hope that the cameras get better and better not worse and thus far i have not seen any like show stoppers on this camera and using it for a month and putting us through his paces it’s essentially the hero 9 with some added features some features that are more marketing focus like you know higher frame rates and some features just more practical like a improved touch screen in the back and the wired offloads which is by far my favorite feature like i said before with that thank you and keep our website MYPAID2BLOG.