GoPro Hero review: the action camera king goes back to basics

The GoPro Hero is GoPro’s new entry-level action camera. At half the price of the company’s Hero 13 Black flagship, and about half the size, it’s a small, cheap and rugged mountable camera that keeps the price down by keeping things simple. Perhaps too simple.

While I genuinely appreciate how simple and easy this camera is to use, the fact that it offers little control over image quality, only three recording modes, no way to record audio except via the internal mic, and no way to swap out a battery meant that I butted up against limitations and disappointments all too frequently during my review shoots.

Image quality isn’t terrible, but the 8-bit footage is a long way below what’s possible with the Hero 13 Black and other higher-end action cameras. The Hero also isn’t the smallest action camera around, with DJI and Insta360 offering even more compact, lightweight alternatives.

The bright spots here are the affordable price tag, reliable image stabilization and solid battery life, which make the Hero a camera that retains some appeal despite its weaknesses. If you’re looking for a cheap, simple action camera (one you could hand over to your kids, perhaps) that slots nicely into GoPro’s vast ecosystem of mounting accessories and apps, the Hero is that camera.

GoPro Hero: price and release date

• $199.99 / £199.99 / AU$349.99
• Available now

The GoPro Hero is available to buy now, priced from $199.99 / £199.99 / AU$349.99. That’s half the price of GoPro’s current flagship Hero 13 Black action camera, and quite a bit cheaper than the mini action cameras offered by competitors too: the aging DJI Action 2 costs $229 / £215 and the Insta360 Go 3 and Go 3S cost $319.99 / £319.99 and $399.99 / £349.99 respectively.

That makes the Hero one of the most affordable current action cameras around at launch, and you’ll probably only find something cheaper by buying secondhand or during sales.

GoPro Hero: design and handling

• Small, lightweight and sturdy build
• Quick-release magnetic mounting system
• Waterproof to 20m without a case
• Front and rear OLED touchscreens

Like all GoPro action cameras, the Hero is rugged and waterproof. The tough plastic casing feels like it could take a beating, and is sealed against water up to a depth of 16ft / 5m. The camera lens is given extra protection in the form of a toughened, water-repelling glass cover, which can be replaced in the event it gets damaged.

It comes with GoPro’s fold-out mounting fingers on the bottom, allowing it to be attached to over 35 GoPro-made (and countless third-party) accessories like selfie sticks, helmet mounts, bicycle mounts and the like. In the box you get a single curved adhesive mount, one mounting buckle and one screw.

The Hero is very small and lightweight, especially by GoPro standards. It weighs just 3oz / 86g, and makes the other ‘tiny’ GoPro model I have to hand, the 2022-released Hero 11 Black Mini, feel quite bulky and awkward in comparison. There are smaller action cameras around, however; the excellent Insta360 Go 3S springs to mind, being half the Hero’s weight and size and able to record 4K video too.

Despite its small proportions, the Hero has room for a touchscreen on the back (the 11 Black Mini had no screen at all). There’s nothing outstanding about the screen’s quality – it’s LCD rather than OLED – but it does its job well, giving you just enough space to swipe though the shooting modes, adjust settings in the menu screens and review the shots stored on the camera.

Physical controls are nice and simple, with just two large, easy-to-press rubber buttons: one to start and stop image capture, and one to power the camera on and off and for switching quickly between the shooting modes. That, really, is it. There are status lights on the front and back of the camera too, so you’ll know when it’s recording or recharging.

Storage comes courtesy of a microSD card slot, and without one in the box you’ll have to supply your own. It’ll need to have a V30 or faster UHS-3 rating too.

Alongside the card slot is a USB-C port, which can be used for charging the battery or transferring files; GoPro supplies a short USB-C to USB-C cable in the box. Annoyingly, I wasn’t able to use this to drag and drop files from the Hero onto my Mac, just from my PC. The GoPro Quik app running on a Mac recognized that the camera was connected, but instructed me to use a card reader to import the files. Adding unnecessary steps to the process isn’t a smart design choice in my opinion, especially if they require the user to own another piece of hardware.

The battery, incidentally, is built into the camera and is non-removable. Pricier GoPro models support battery swapping, but the Hero’s streamlined approach means you’re stuck with what’s in there.

GoPro Hero: features and performance

• 80-minute battery life
• Voice controls
• Image stabilization applied by Quik app

Battery life is solid, mind you. I set up my fully charged Hero review sample to record 4K/30p video continuously and it lasted an impressive 80 minutes. In the low-power battery-saver mode, recording at 1080/30p, it’ll record for over 2.5 hours. When recharging, the indicator light doesn’t change color or turn off to show that the battery is fully charged, so it was difficult for me to gauge how long it takes to go from empty to full – but from periodic checking of the battery levels it seems acceptably fast.

In keeping with GoPro’s bare-bones approach to the Hero, the feature set is limited. The Hero’s menu screen features only six options: voice control on/off; beeps on/off; screen saver on/off; orientation lock on/off; battery saver on/off; screen lock on/off. The voice controls work fine, allowing you to stop and start recordings, take a photo, and turn the power off by saying “GoPro…” followed by a command. It recognized my accent and responded accordingly almost every time.

GoPro’s HyperSmooth electronic image stabilization is available, but it can’t be applied in-camera, only externally via the GoPro Quik app. If you want stabilized videos you’ll need to export your videos to a mobile device or Mac computer (there’s currently no Quik app for Windows PCs; GoPro says it’s ‘coming soon’). The good news is that, once you’ve exported them, videos are automatically stabilized very effectively.

The Quik app itself is generally well designed and easy to use, although it did crash on my iPhone 13 several times while exporting large files to my photo roll, and I did bristle a little at the way it was constantly nudging me to buy a GoPro subscription.

The subscription, which costs $49.99 / £49.99 / AU$69.99 a year (or half that if you’re a new subscriber signing up for your first year) comes with some useful benefits, though: unlimited cloud storage and automatic uploading at full quality for all your photos and videos; automatically edited clip videos, ‘directed’ by AI; money off accessories purchased through the GoPro website and off your next GoPro camera; and up to two replacement cameras per year if your GoPro is lost or damaged. If you own more than one GoPro, I’d say it’s definitely worth it.

• Features and performance score: 3.5/5

GoPro Hero: image and video quality

• 12MP stills and 4K/30p video
• 8-bit color depth and 50Mbps maximum bitrate
• Built-in microphones

When I say that GoPro has kept things simple with the Hero, I mean it. There are just three shooting modes available: Slo-Mo, Video and Photo. There’s no room for live streaming, time lapse, burst photos or any of the other modes you find on most action cameras.

And, within the modes you do get, there’s really no way to adjust the settings. The only way to change how image capture works is to flick the camera into battery-saver mode, which reduces video quality in the name of squeezing more juice out of the camera: 4K/30p video becomes 1080/30p and 2.7K/60p slow-motion video becomes 1080/60p; the 12MP still photos remain the same.

Video is captured at 8-bit quality with a maximum bitrate of 50Mbps. There are no options to shoot in a ‘flat’ log color profile for more post-production control; the Hero really is designed to keep things super-simple. As a result, the video quality is poor by GoPro’s standards, and if you’re used to the excellent colors and detail that come out of its flagship models, you’ll immediately notice that the Hero lags a long way behind.

The electronic stabilization may be impressive, but the image quality itself is dull and lifeless in 4K, and noticeably soft in 1080p. And that’s in good lighting. In low light, the quality takes a dive, with increased noise and decreased detail. I’ve edited together a short video to demonstrate the quality in daylight, so that you can see for yourselves what it’s like, and below I’ve posted a few 12MP still photos. I’ve tweaked these photos slightly with Adobe Lightroom to give them more pop, as they look flat straight from the camera.

The Hero limits video clip times. When I left it continuously recording 4K/30p until the battery died it split the resulting video into several files, each about 10 minutes long. You can edit these together to make a single video later, of course, but it does require more work.

So overall, I found the image quality disappointing. Yes, the Hero is cheap by big-name action camera standards, but there are plenty of old models from Insta360, DJI and GoPro that you might be able to pick up at cheap prices and which offer more options and better performance.

I should also talk about audio recording, which really isn’t great. The Hero doesn’t support external microphones, even USB mics, so the only options for recording live audio for your videos is the 2-mic internal setup. It’s far from terrible in good conditions, but on a blustery day there’s nothing to reduce the interference from wind.

GoPro Hero: testing scorecard

Should I buy the GoPro Hero?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro: also consider

How I tested the GoPro Hero

• Battery stamina tests
• Vlogging and cycling outdoors

I spent a few days using the DJI Hero at home and in my neighborhood, testing out its video and photo performance in a variety of locations and conditions and mounting the camera on selfie sticks, mini tripods and my bike.

I also tried out GoPro’s Quik app on both my iPhone 13 and MacBook Air, and edited footage both using the app and later with DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.

First reviewed October 2024