The GoPro Hero 9 Black is the most powerful and versatile action camera you can buy, but for most people, its predecessor offers better value. While the new sensor and front display are useful additions, the changes don’t collectively represent a big leap over the Hero 8 Black. Its slightly unresponsive touchscreen is also a little frustrating, even if a firmware fix is en route. No other action can match the Hero 9 Black’s skillset, but others do currently edge it for value. Keep reading on for the GoPro Hero 9 Black review here.
GoPro Hero 9 Black Review
GoPro Hero 9 Black price and release date
- The Hero 9 Black is available to buy now $449.99 / £429.99 / AU$699.95
- You can get a big discount if you buy it with a one-year GoPro subscription
- The new Max Lens Mod will be available in October
The GoPro Hero 9 Black is available to buy now for $449.99 / £429.99 / AU$699.95, which represents an 11% price increase on Hero 8 Black’s launch price.
However, you can get a sizable discount on the Hero 9 Black if you get it with a one-year GoPro subscription. If you go this route, the GoPro Hero 9 Black is available to buy $349.99 / £329.99 / $559.95, including the subscription.
Formerly known as GoPro Plus, the latter brings advantages like unlimited cloud storage and replacements for broken cameras (up to two per year). While GoPro is clearly hoping you’ll carry on paying the $49.99 / £49.99 / $69.99 annual subscription after the first year, it is possible to cancel the auto-renewing service.
Already a GoPro Plus subscriber? You can also take advantage of the discounted $349.99 / £329.99 / $559.95 price for the Hero 9 Black.
Design
- New 1.4-inch color display on the front is useful for vloggers
- Redesigned body is around 10% bigger and heavier than Hero 8 Black
- Larger rear display isn’t as responsive as previous GoPros
The Hero 9 Black is the biggest redesign of GoPro’s flagship action camera since the Hero 5 Black, and the results are mostly positive (with a few caveats).
There are three big physical changes from the Hero 8 Black: a new 1.4-inch color display on the front, a beefier body (to house its bigger battery), and a larger rear 2.27-inch rear touchscreen.
Collectively, these new features feel like a response to the DJI Osmo Action, a fresh-faced rival that i some ways made GoPro action cameras feel a little dated. In some ways, the Hero 9 Black still does, and that’s partly because the new features all come with slight downsides.
Features
- New 23.6MP sensor brings 5K/30p video and 20MP stills
- This also helps boost its electronic image stabilization
- New features trialled in GoPro Labs are built into the Hero 9 Black
GoPro’s special sauce has long been the combination of its class-leading HyperSmooth stabilization, first seen on the Hero 7 Black, and clever software features like TimeWarp. While the Hero 9 Black improves on these features and broadens its versatility, it doesn’t really introduce one killer reason to upgrade from the Hero 8 Black.
Not there aren’t some significant changes under the hood. GoPro flagships have had 12MP sensors going all the way back to Hero 3 Black in 2012, but the Hero 9 Black takes the radical step of pushing this resolution up to 23.6MP with a new sensor. This allows it to shoot 5K/30p video and take 20MP stills, while also supporting the more powerful HyperSmooth Boost stabilization mode (which crops your footage by 25%) in all resolutions and frame-rates.
Video
Hero9 Black has a 23.6 MP sensor, which in turn means it can capture video at 5K in 30 frames per second (fps) at 100Mbps. If that’s impressive, it’s also incredibly capacity-hungry; the 4K 60fps is probably the one to go for if you’re after both efficiency and smoothness. The general step-up in resolution also means the abandoning of 720p, with faux-lens options comprising SuperView (16mm), wide (16-34mm) and linear (19-39mm) and narrow (27mm).
Despite the appearance of 5K the must-have feature is Hypersmooth 3.0, which means cleverly stabilized footage across all resolutions, with a ‘boost’ feature also available.
The linear view also has 360º camera-style auto-correct horizon leveling that happens in-camera. In theory, that means easy-to-watch footage where the horizon stays level. It’s another feature for vloggers, and in practice it’s imprecise and laggy; expect it to improve on future GoPro cameras. In all other modes the Hero9 Black captures peerless video that has plenty of color, contrast and shadow detail, with a Boost option to really smooth things out when the action gets choppy.
Low-light video in ‘night mode’ is far less impressive and a touch noisy, with a new HDR night-lapse of the night sky for an hour looking reasonably good. There’s also a new ‘scheduled capture’ mode for filming video or, more likely, time-lapses, at a pre-ordained time. For example, you could go to bed in Iceland and set your Hero9 Black to film the Northern Lights for you … ditto a sunrise while you sleep-in. You can also set it to film for, say, an hour, before it switches itself off.
Photos
Action cameras are roundly ignored as photographic devices by some users, but that’s going to change with the arrival of the Hero9 Black. That’s partly because, like the Akaso Brave 7 LE, the Hero9 Black can take 20MP still photos.
It offers wide (16-34mm) and linear (19-39mm) lens modes, each allowing 2x digital zoom options, and a fixed narrow mode (27mm), all of which feature a delay shutter option for 3s and 10s. There’s also a LiveBurst (motion photos), Burst (25 photos per second) and Night Photo modes, with the latter respectable and easily outshining the Hero9 Black’s video exploits in the dark.
As well as RAW support the Hero9 Black also has HDR and SuperPhoto, the latter of which captures excellent dynamic range, though taking HDR and SuperPhoto images means a few seconds’ wait for processing. Manual mode allows tweaks up to shutter speed of 30 seconds and ISO up to 6400.
However, perhaps more important than all of that is the Hero9 Black’s new ‘save frame’ feature; playback any video on the app and it’s a one-button instruction to save a 14.7MP still image to your phone. It means you can stick to video and think about photos later.
