GoPro Hero 7 Line Up Announced

Go Pro has been facing some rough times lately. Sales are down, products are failing or going unrecognized. We won’t even mention the leak inside the organization spilling unreleased product info. There is some good new though, the extreme sports camera guys have officially announced a new 7-series line featuring three hd cameras. They are separated by numerous features and functions in quality. The new tiers are now easily distinguished by their color. They come in black, silver, and white housings. With Black At the top end of the line is the $399 GoPro Hero 7 Black. All the Hero 7 uses the same 12-megapixel sensor, has the same custom GP1 processor (with a small bump in RAM), and offers the same capture capabilities: 4K video at 60-frames per second, 2K at 120-frames per second, and hi-def 1080P at 240-frames per second if you’re after an extremely slow motion effect.

Whats New With the GoPro Hero 7

With the cameras being waterproof to a depth of 10 meters, can livestream footage, and offers GPS location tracking, but the real reason GoPro thinks you’ll upgrade to the Hero 7 Black is a feature it’s calling “HyperSmooth stabilization,”.  This  the company says will work as well as a mechanical hardware gimbal when it comes to smoothing out footage captured when running, riding a bike, or other activities where you’re bouncing around.

No more jumpy shaky footage as you leap from an airplane with nothing but a pillow case? BTW,  that does need to be visually documented if anyone wants to try it . The still software stabilization, meaning data from a built-in gyro is being used to digitally cancel out any jarring motions, which in turn means your footage is going to get cropped. Cropping? Could be good, could be bad, ill have to see a final shot to tell. Not optimistic though.

The Hero 7 Black is the most familiar of the bunch, as it nearly exactly copies the all-black, waterproof, rubbery design of its predecessors (the Hero 5 and Hero 6 Black). It’s the second camera to use GoPro’s custom GP1 processor, which the company first used last year in the Hero 6 Black after splitting with longstanding supplier Ambarella. There are number of new features in the GoPro Hero 7 Black due to the work GoPro has been doing on their own. New features like including live-streaming, a wicked in-camera time-lapse feature, a smart HDR photo mode, and the most important, the groundbreaking in-camera digital stabilization algorithm.

Black/ Silver/White

Stepping down from the GoPro Hero 7 Black are the $299 Hero 7 Silver and the $199 Hero 7 White. Those price cuts cost you the fancy GP1 sensor and the Black version’s HyperSmooth stabilization. They also include a smaller 10-megapixel sensor and reduced capture capabilities. The Hero 7 Silver maxes out 4K at 30-frames per second. In contrast the GPS-less Hero 7 White can only hit 1440P at 60-frames per second. You might also notice that neither camera comes with the Hero 7 Black’s front-facing status LCD screen. This is  making it a little hard to nail the correct facial expression as you are “landing it”.