Are New GoPros Worth the Upgrade?
It happened again. Another “revolutionary” new product with “never before seen” features that makes everything that came before it, worthless. It’s like clockwork. I’ll forgive you if you think I'm talking about the new iPhone 15 or the new Sony A7CII. No, I’m referring to the new GoPro Hero 12. (Hopefully the title gave that away.)
I’ll leave the specs to dozens of the influencers and reviewers who get paid to talk up the new product. And I’m sure plenty of them will compare it with last year’s model, so I won’t do that either.
Instead, I want to look back at the Hero 3+ that’s been sitting on my shelf and gathering dust since being replaced by my more recent versions, and I wonder: how well does an old GoPro hold up?
I don’t have the new Hero 12. I don’t get free products and I don’t buy the latest model each year. My most modern GoPro is the Hero 9, something made 7 years after the Hero 3+.
So while everyone else talks about the Hero 12, this “review” will revisit a comparison between the Hero 3+ and the Hero 9 to see which is better. Without a doubt, the winner is the new Hero 9, but the question is by how much? Sure the newer one can do 1080 at 240fps and 4k at 60, settings that weren’t even imaginable nearly a decade before, but what about the comparable settings? In an orange-to-orange comparison, does the Hero 3+ still produce good footage compared to the more modern device?
To answer this, I’ll do 4 3 side-by-side tests of each camera using as similar settings as possible. And since someone who’s good with Premiere Pro can color correct both ProTune settings to look the same, that setting will stay turned off. This should show what 7 years of color science can do (and is probably more useful since I imagine most normal people probably don’t use ProTune anyways.)
Alright, excited to begin? Let’s go!
Test 1: Hero 9 - 4K@60 FPS (ultra wide) vs Hero 3+ - 4K@15 FPS (wide)
The fact that the Hero 3+ can do 4K footage at all is impressive, considering that Sony released their first 4K TV in 2012 for a whopping $25,000. 4K on the Hero3+ was most likely just a marketing gimmick. At 12 and 15 frames per second, it’s what Gizmodo called “wonderfully useless.” And yes, the 15fps is terrible to watch, especially compared to the smooth 60fps of the Hero 9, but the image isn’t bad. It might be a little on the soft side and the sky is slightly more red than the Hero 9, but overall not terrible. Not usable for video, except in maybe some weird fringe case, but not terrible for stills.
Test 2: Hero 9 - 2.7K@120 FPS (linear) vs Hero 3+ - 2.7K@30 FPS (medium)
As long as you can get past the camera shake, it’s a perfectly usable video, especially considered the harsh conditions that driving towards the sun can provide. The car looks a little more red on the Hero 3+ but the terrain has more green, and again the image is a little softer and less saturated. With some basic color correction however, I’d still have no issue tossing this into my bag. The weird thing is that in some shots, mostly those driving into the sun, the Hero 3 looks less blown out than the Hero 9. It almost makes me wonder if the metering on the Hero 3+ is better than on the Hero 9. At the very least, makes me question the settings I was using.
Test 3: 1080p@60 FPS
This is the first comparison between these two cameras that use the same settings, ones that are probably the most commonly used by the majority of users. 1080p is the safe standard.
Unfortunately, the record button on the Hero3+ never registered my finger pushing down on it, so it never recorded this one, meaning I have nothing to compare the Hero 9 footage with. I’d argue this is an advantage for the newer camera, except I’ve had the Hero 9 lock up on me, also leading me to miss shots.
Test 4: 1080p@60 FPS (SuperView) - Low Light Test
SuperView debuted on the Hero 3+, and I never really understood it. To me, it took a normal 4:3 frame and squeezed it into a 16:9 ratio, making everything look short and fat, and unless you have a scene that can make full use of the framing, you just end up with a lot of sky. I thought it was a gimmick that wouldn’t catch on, but it was still in the Hero 9’s settings in 2020, and it looks like the Hero 12 still has something similar.
The Hero3+ still has the same softness issue the other tests did, which leads me to think it’s a lens issue. The colors continue to be more saturated on the Hero 9, although the color balance is more accurate, but overall the two cameras are very similar in the low-light situation. The Hero3+ does have the “low-light” setting turned on, which isn’t an option on the Hero 9, and as a result has a little more motion blur and bleeding from the highlights. Both cameras seem to have the same amount of compression artifacts and aliasing issues. And while the Hero 9 is a little more readable, it isn’t significantly better, and probably more due to the image stabilization than the sensor differences. The Hero 9’s image stabilization comes at a cost though, cutting pretty deeply into the image frame.
Conclusion
The Hero 9 is a great camera. I wish my Hero 3+ had its image stabilization when I did my bike trip years ago. But, it didn’t, and was still more than capable of producing several great shots. And even if I could time travel back and give myself the Hero 9, I doubt any of the shots would’ve been drastically different. Sure, the stabilization might have let me try another angle or two, and being able to record in 4K would’ve produced larger still images than I could get from my 1080p footage, but everything else would be pretty much the same.
So, if there’s so little increase in quality between the 3+ and the 9, I don’t think the increase between the 9 and the 12 would be much different. That means the only real difference comes down to features. Although those features may make it easier to get a good shot, unless you need them, I say to save your money and use the GoPro you already have.
Honestly, I’m not sure what I think about that, other than once again the old saying proves true: “the best camera to use is the one you have.”