The GoPro Hero 8: A Step Forward in Camera Technology

I recently had the opportunity to review the GoPro Hero 8, and I must say that it's a significant improvement over its predecessor. One of the first things I noticed was its performance in low-light conditions. While the GoPro Hero 7 struggled with image stabilization at lower light levels, the Hero 8 seems to have ironed out these issues. The camera's ability to capture high-quality images even in dimly lit environments is a major advantage.

Another notable feature of the Hero 8 is its audio capabilities. With three microphones and advanced noise-rejection algorithms, it does an excellent job of filtering out wind noise and ambient sounds. This is particularly important when filming outdoors on windy days like today, as I can attest to the difficulties of capturing high-quality audio in such conditions. The Hero 7's early wind algorithms often resulted in weird EQ adjustments that made my voice sound like I was talking through a toilet – a feature that has since been greatly improved upon.

The Hero 8 also boasts four different lens settings, depending on the resolution set. These include Super Wide ( equivalent to a 16mm full-frame camera), Standard Wide (which crops in a bit but still allows for up to 4K resolution), Linear (my personal favorite, which provides a standard view without the fisheye effect), and Narrow (the highest setting, which upscales to 2K). This flexibility is a significant improvement over the Hero 7's limited options.

One of the most exciting features of the Hero 8 is its new mounting system. Gone are the days of needing an external housing or cage to mount the camera on a tripod, helmet, or chest – simply snap out these two little feet at the bottom and it'll snap into place. This design change makes the camera more accessible to users who want to experiment with different mounts and accessories. However, this also means that we no longer have a removable lens protector, which was a common feature on earlier GoPro models. If you plan on using your GoPro extensively in extreme situations or exposing it to harsh weather conditions, be aware that a cracked or scratched glass can render the camera unusable.

For photography enthusiasts, the Hero 8 offers some exciting features, including HDR photos, Super Photo, and raw image capture options. The ability to shoot hyper-lapses is another unique feature that allows you to capture moving images while staying in motion. Additionally, the camera supports voice commands, social media streaming, and 1080p video uploads to YouTube.

Overall, the GoPro Hero 8 represents a significant leap forward in camera technology. Its improved low-light performance, enhanced audio capabilities, and flexible lens settings make it an excellent choice for users who want high-quality images and videos. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or just starting out with your GoPro, this new model is definitely worth considering.

I must note that I'm not getting into the details of how the Hero 8's wind noise-rejection algorithms work – it's a complex topic that requires some technical expertise to fully understand. Suffice it to say that these improvements have greatly enhanced the overall user experience and made it easier for photographers to capture high-quality images even in challenging conditions.

As I wrap up my review, I want to thank you guys for dropping by and sharing your thoughts on this article. If there's anything specific you'd like me to cover more often – such as the capabilities of tiny cameras or advanced photography techniques – please let me know in the comments below. And don't worry, I'll make sure to get out of here before the rain starts again, so we can continue our conversation another time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso in the last few camera reviews that have done if start mixing things up a little bit and I have done footage where I've been out on the street shooting and a lot of people have asked me in the comments what camera are you using to film the street footage on and what happens is I'll get like one comment and then you'll get another and another if you start answering nobody reads the replies so I thought maybe just be easy to do a video and share with you guys believe it or not this is kind of one of my new favorite things I've been using the GoPro Hero 8 and I'm actually filming this on a GoPro Hero 8 so I know this is a little bit of an interception but basically the deal is is that GoPro reached out to me and said would you like to review and I said absolutely is it's gonna be a few weeks before we have some review models and I couldn't wait so I bought one so now I have two so I thought it would be pretty fun to do a GoPro Hero 8 review that's filmed pretty much on the GoPro Hero 8 so we're gonna break this down and talk about all the cool features that I find very useful in this but real quick I want to give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at gear focus so if you want to offload gear that you're just not using anymore traditionally we've only had a few options you can trade it in for something new which is quick and simple but you only get 30 to 40 cents on the dollar it's pretty hassle-free but you just don't get any value out of the equipment that you already own of course you could also use an auction site like eBay but be prepared to pay a 10 to 13 percent commission and if you take credit cards there's another 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per transaction those fees actually come from the banks there's no way around them but I want to mention a new option which is gear focus comm gear focus is an online marketplace for buying and selling photography and photo gear their commission fee is only 3.5% after an item has sold which is the lowest that you're going to find anywhere if you want to purchase equipment they have an excellent support staff that approves all listings and they know what red flags to look for like poor descriptions or images not of the actual item that's being sold gear focused calm takes a great deal of pride in building a community of reputable buyers and sellers and quite frankly this is actually something that our industry has needed for a long time now I've even tried gear focused for myself this week I have an old Canon 5d Mark 3 that sits on the shelf and doesn't get much used so I decided that I would go ahead and sell it on gear focus and maybe get it to good home of somebody who would appreciate it more it's extremely easy to upload images get your description set and of course gear focus are extremely helpful and responsive if you have questions on pricing or your descriptions so head over to gear focus comm by using the link in the description I think you're gonna find this to be an excellent resource for not only buying equipment but also a way to offload equipment that you're no longer using so check it out and I wanna give a special thanks to the folks at gear focused comm for sponsoring an episode of the arts of photography so one thing that you should know about me I've got a lot of GoPros in fact I'm kind of a huge GoPro nerd the first GoPro that I ever purchased was the GoPro Hero 4 which was just this little box that you had to put in a cage somehow and it did 4k video it didn't have any image stabilization it didn't have any wind reduction but in the right situation it could be really cool I actually skipped the GoPro Hero 5 but I did buy the Hero 5 session which is probably one of my favorite form factors for any GoPro it's kind of too bad that they've abandoned it then came the GoPro Hero 6 black edition which was the first GoPro to feature some kind of image stabilization which really wasn't that great but at least it was a step in the right direction then came the GoPro Hero 7 black which up to date was one of my favorite GoPro heroes I think that the image stabilization which they rebranded his hyper smooth was exceptional in this camera and then this brings us now to the GoPro Hero 8 but of course we have to talk about the big feature in the Hero 8 which is image stabilization now this is a digital image stabilization that GoPro refers to is hyper smooth and we have now on the hero 8 hyper smooth 2.0 will give you a little brief history of GoPro and image stabilization so right now I am filming on the GoPro Hero 6 and the wind has stopped but maybe that'll come back up so you can hear a little of that kicking in but anyway this was a very frustrating model for me because it was the first one with image stabilization I've just put it on the same selfie stick I've been using it just wasn't as good now if you're holding still it's okay but as soon as you start to walk it is not the greatest in the world it was okay but then the hero 7 came out so the GoPro Hero 7 which I'm filming on right now was the first version of the go to feature hyper smooth and this was version one and this was really a massive improvement and hyper smooth to is even better but I would actually go as far to say as if you are in a big budget and you really want to go pro this is the one that I would recommend this one gets the job done it's got the image stabilization you can do hyper lapses it's got all the essential stuff that the hero 8 has approved on it's still a very solid go pro but just to show you the difference this is the hero 7 and now back to the hero 8 with hyper smooth 2.0 this is one of my favorite GoPros and as I mentioned earlier it's completely replaced using a gimbal for me I've been using it on a lot of my videos and camera reviews when I want to go out and about because I don't have to bring very much with me which brings me to another point that these little tiny cameras used to be branded under the umbrella action cameras and I think elements like hyper smooth the improved low-light performance so and so forth has kind of put these in a category where they're just not limited to what we considered to be an action camera it's more of an everyday you skin there have been some big improvements to the user interface in the hero 8 we still have the swipeable touch screen so if you swipe left to right this will change the mode that you're in from hyperlapse or time-lapse to video to stills once you're in any given mode we now have buttons on the actual screen to do things like turn on slow motion or change your lens profile or go into the boost mode for hyperlapse for super steady motion we also have the ability to use different custom settings which is really nice if you film with different setups and you want to create custom profiles just to switch back and forth between them for sliding from the top down gives you your global settings and preferences and swiping from the bottom up is going to give you access to all of your media files the only problem that I've had visit that you use multiple models of different GoPros while you're on a shoot things have moved around in there in different locations so it's a minor complaint and I know it has be done and I know it's hard to update old GoPros to be uniform but I just kind of wish there was a little more consistency there I really like this interface it's very clean it's very intuitive the first time you power up your GoPro it's going to give you a tutorial telling you what everything does so it's really easy to use the GoPro also pairs well with the GoPro mobile app which is available for either Apple iOS or Android which allows you to do things like adjust your global settings or update your firmware and it's really well executed another change that you're going to see is in the actual battery now the batteries are the same size the same milliamp power rating but the big difference is that GoPro has redesigned them slightly to give you a faster draw performance this is done for some of the more power intensive things that you have on the camera for instance the image stabilization so on and so forth now these batteries are backwards compatible with older GoPros if you have firmware updates you can use the older batteries on this GoPro the difference is is that some features are unavailable and so it's something to keep in mind if you have a whole bunch of workflow matters another thing that I'm very excited about on the hero 8 is the low-light performance it is actually really good see part of the problem with an action camera is that they're really designed to be used in a bright light the truth is you're not really in bright light most of the time the GoPro Hero 7 I think was really good at low-light however the image stabilization would kind of fall apart and do weird things on you the GoPro Hero 8 seems to have that worked out just fine I'm not sure this was the best day to do a camera review outside with 25 mile an hour wind gusts and rain but hey this camera is waterproof up to 33 feet I don't think we're gonna get anywhere near that today so one feature that is much improved on the hero 8 is the way it captures audio and particularly the way it rejects wind noise now it's really windy out here you can hear it but what it's doing is it's using three microphones and then an hour the behind-the-scenes to kind of work out the noise versus what my voice is saying and so I think it does a really nice job you still hear the wind but it's a little more ambient it's actually kind of acceptable GoPro has not always been this way kind of the early wind algorithms would kind of do weird things to the EQ and it would sound like you were talking in a toilet sometimes I think they've done a really nice job on this model the hero 8 has four different lens settings depending on what your resolution is set at this first one is super wide which is the equivalent of a 16 millimeter on a full-frame camera you've got standard wide which crops in a little bit on the sensor but still gives you up to 4k resolution we have linear which is kind of a standard view this is the one I use pretty much a hundred percent of the time because it looks like a regular lens you don't get that weird fisheye effect and if you're willing to give up just a little bit of resolution that this is narrow the highest this will go is actually 2k you're watching it upscale to 4k it looks fine we're gonna go back to linear because that's how I like to roll interestingly enough on the GoPro Hero 7 the last model linear was not available in 4k and so you had to drop down to 2k for that so cameras got a lot better in a lot of ways another thing to note about the Hero 8 is this is the first GoPro that we have that does not require an external housing to do any mounting with in other words we used to have the little cage it would fit in that's how you would mount it to a tripod or a helmet or a chest or whatever you want to do this one has these two little feet that stick out on the bottom you simply snap those out and it snaps into place it is a really good thing I know why they did this I'm getting to that but the downside of this is we do not have the removable lens protector now if you film a lot on a GoPro you'll know what I'm talking about I'm not going to have this problem today because it's very overcast but typically when it's sunny if you get the right flare and it gets the GoPro flare and a lot of times I would just take it off to avoid that but also use it to mount filters maybe a neutral density something like that the one downside to this is that if you drive your GoPros hard and you use them in a lot of extreme situations and you happen to scratch or crack that glass it's game over you have to get a whole new GoPro so for what that's worth GoPro do make some protectors for this it even got a cage system I'm not really sure how that works but anyway it's something to note and something to know going in depends on how hard you push these things if you use the hero 8 for photography there's some really cool features as well for instance you have the ability to do HDR photos where it'll take multi exposures and stitch them together in camera has a feature called super photo which applies its own computational imaging onto the image or you can just shoot raw or get JPEGs straight out of the camera of course you have the ability to shoot hyper lapses which is a feature that's kind of like a time-lapse but you can stay moving I filmed this whole sequence just while walking and holding the camera right in front of me also features voice commands you can do 1080p streaming on social media or on to YouTube it's got a lot of great features that I really haven't even gone into here because I don't particularly use them myself but I'm curious to know if this is something you guys would like to see me cover more often like what you can do with really powerful tiny cameras such as the Koch bro drop me a comment and let me know I'm gonna try and get out of here before the rain starts again I'll see you guys in the next video until then laterso in the last few camera reviews that have done if start mixing things up a little bit and I have done footage where I've been out on the street shooting and a lot of people have asked me in the comments what camera are you using to film the street footage on and what happens is I'll get like one comment and then you'll get another and another if you start answering nobody reads the replies so I thought maybe just be easy to do a video and share with you guys believe it or not this is kind of one of my new favorite things I've been using the GoPro Hero 8 and I'm actually filming this on a GoPro Hero 8 so I know this is a little bit of an interception but basically the deal is is that GoPro reached out to me and said would you like to review and I said absolutely is it's gonna be a few weeks before we have some review models and I couldn't wait so I bought one so now I have two so I thought it would be pretty fun to do a GoPro Hero 8 review that's filmed pretty much on the GoPro Hero 8 so we're gonna break this down and talk about all the cool features that I find very useful in this but real quick I want to give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at gear focus so if you want to offload gear that you're just not using anymore traditionally we've only had a few options you can trade it in for something new which is quick and simple but you only get 30 to 40 cents on the dollar it's pretty hassle-free but you just don't get any value out of the equipment that you already own of course you could also use an auction site like eBay but be prepared to pay a 10 to 13 percent commission and if you take credit cards there's another 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per transaction those fees actually come from the banks there's no way around them but I want to mention a new option which is gear focus comm gear focus is an online marketplace for buying and selling photography and photo gear their commission fee is only 3.5% after an item has sold which is the lowest that you're going to find anywhere if you want to purchase equipment they have an excellent support staff that approves all listings and they know what red flags to look for like poor descriptions or images not of the actual item that's being sold gear focused calm takes a great deal of pride in building a community of reputable buyers and sellers and quite frankly this is actually something that our industry has needed for a long time now I've even tried gear focused for myself this week I have an old Canon 5d Mark 3 that sits on the shelf and doesn't get much used so I decided that I would go ahead and sell it on gear focus and maybe get it to good home of somebody who would appreciate it more it's extremely easy to upload images get your description set and of course gear focus are extremely helpful and responsive if you have questions on pricing or your descriptions so head over to gear focus comm by using the link in the description I think you're gonna find this to be an excellent resource for not only buying equipment but also a way to offload equipment that you're no longer using so check it out and I wanna give a special thanks to the folks at gear focused comm for sponsoring an episode of the arts of photography so one thing that you should know about me I've got a lot of GoPros in fact I'm kind of a huge GoPro nerd the first GoPro that I ever purchased was the GoPro Hero 4 which was just this little box that you had to put in a cage somehow and it did 4k video it didn't have any image stabilization it didn't have any wind reduction but in the right situation it could be really cool I actually skipped the GoPro Hero 5 but I did buy the Hero 5 session which is probably one of my favorite form factors for any GoPro it's kind of too bad that they've abandoned it then came the GoPro Hero 6 black edition which was the first GoPro to feature some kind of image stabilization which really wasn't that great but at least it was a step in the right direction then came the GoPro Hero 7 black which up to date was one of my favorite GoPro heroes I think that the image stabilization which they rebranded his hyper smooth was exceptional in this camera and then this brings us now to the GoPro Hero 8 but of course we have to talk about the big feature in the Hero 8 which is image stabilization now this is a digital image stabilization that GoPro refers to is hyper smooth and we have now on the hero 8 hyper smooth 2.0 will give you a little brief history of GoPro and image stabilization so right now I am filming on the GoPro Hero 6 and the wind has stopped but maybe that'll come back up so you can hear a little of that kicking in but anyway this was a very frustrating model for me because it was the first one with image stabilization I've just put it on the same selfie stick I've been using it just wasn't as good now if you're holding still it's okay but as soon as you start to walk it is not the greatest in the world it was okay but then the hero 7 came out so the GoPro Hero 7 which I'm filming on right now was the first version of the go to feature hyper smooth and this was version one and this was really a massive improvement and hyper smooth to is even better but I would actually go as far to say as if you are in a big budget and you really want to go pro this is the one that I would recommend this one gets the job done it's got the image stabilization you can do hyper lapses it's got all the essential stuff that the hero 8 has approved on it's still a very solid go pro but just to show you the difference this is the hero 7 and now back to the hero 8 with hyper smooth 2.0 this is one of my favorite GoPros and as I mentioned earlier it's completely replaced using a gimbal for me I've been using it on a lot of my videos and camera reviews when I want to go out and about because I don't have to bring very much with me which brings me to another point that these little tiny cameras used to be branded under the umbrella action cameras and I think elements like hyper smooth the improved low-light performance so and so forth has kind of put these in a category where they're just not limited to what we considered to be an action camera it's more of an everyday you skin there have been some big improvements to the user interface in the hero 8 we still have the swipeable touch screen so if you swipe left to right this will change the mode that you're in from hyperlapse or time-lapse to video to stills once you're in any given mode we now have buttons on the actual screen to do things like turn on slow motion or change your lens profile or go into the boost mode for hyperlapse for super steady motion we also have the ability to use different custom settings which is really nice if you film with different setups and you want to create custom profiles just to switch back and forth between them for sliding from the top down gives you your global settings and preferences and swiping from the bottom up is going to give you access to all of your media files the only problem that I've had visit that you use multiple models of different GoPros while you're on a shoot things have moved around in there in different locations so it's a minor complaint and I know it has be done and I know it's hard to update old GoPros to be uniform but I just kind of wish there was a little more consistency there I really like this interface it's very clean it's very intuitive the first time you power up your GoPro it's going to give you a tutorial telling you what everything does so it's really easy to use the GoPro also pairs well with the GoPro mobile app which is available for either Apple iOS or Android which allows you to do things like adjust your global settings or update your firmware and it's really well executed another change that you're going to see is in the actual battery now the batteries are the same size the same milliamp power rating but the big difference is that GoPro has redesigned them slightly to give you a faster draw performance this is done for some of the more power intensive things that you have on the camera for instance the image stabilization so on and so forth now these batteries are backwards compatible with older GoPros if you have firmware updates you can use the older batteries on this GoPro the difference is is that some features are unavailable and so it's something to keep in mind if you have a whole bunch of workflow matters another thing that I'm very excited about on the hero 8 is the low-light performance it is actually really good see part of the problem with an action camera is that they're really designed to be used in a bright light the truth is you're not really in bright light most of the time the GoPro Hero 7 I think was really good at low-light however the image stabilization would kind of fall apart and do weird things on you the GoPro Hero 8 seems to have that worked out just fine I'm not sure this was the best day to do a camera review outside with 25 mile an hour wind gusts and rain but hey this camera is waterproof up to 33 feet I don't think we're gonna get anywhere near that today so one feature that is much improved on the hero 8 is the way it captures audio and particularly the way it rejects wind noise now it's really windy out here you can hear it but what it's doing is it's using three microphones and then an hour the behind-the-scenes to kind of work out the noise versus what my voice is saying and so I think it does a really nice job you still hear the wind but it's a little more ambient it's actually kind of acceptable GoPro has not always been this way kind of the early wind algorithms would kind of do weird things to the EQ and it would sound like you were talking in a toilet sometimes I think they've done a really nice job on this model the hero 8 has four different lens settings depending on what your resolution is set at this first one is super wide which is the equivalent of a 16 millimeter on a full-frame camera you've got standard wide which crops in a little bit on the sensor but still gives you up to 4k resolution we have linear which is kind of a standard view this is the one I use pretty much a hundred percent of the time because it looks like a regular lens you don't get that weird fisheye effect and if you're willing to give up just a little bit of resolution that this is narrow the highest this will go is actually 2k you're watching it upscale to 4k it looks fine we're gonna go back to linear because that's how I like to roll interestingly enough on the GoPro Hero 7 the last model linear was not available in 4k and so you had to drop down to 2k for that so cameras got a lot better in a lot of ways another thing to note about the Hero 8 is this is the first GoPro that we have that does not require an external housing to do any mounting with in other words we used to have the little cage it would fit in that's how you would mount it to a tripod or a helmet or a chest or whatever you want to do this one has these two little feet that stick out on the bottom you simply snap those out and it snaps into place it is a really good thing I know why they did this I'm getting to that but the downside of this is we do not have the removable lens protector now if you film a lot on a GoPro you'll know what I'm talking about I'm not going to have this problem today because it's very overcast but typically when it's sunny if you get the right flare and it gets the GoPro flare and a lot of times I would just take it off to avoid that but also use it to mount filters maybe a neutral density something like that the one downside to this is that if you drive your GoPros hard and you use them in a lot of extreme situations and you happen to scratch or crack that glass it's game over you have to get a whole new GoPro so for what that's worth GoPro do make some protectors for this it even got a cage system I'm not really sure how that works but anyway it's something to note and something to know going in depends on how hard you push these things if you use the hero 8 for photography there's some really cool features as well for instance you have the ability to do HDR photos where it'll take multi exposures and stitch them together in camera has a feature called super photo which applies its own computational imaging onto the image or you can just shoot raw or get JPEGs straight out of the camera of course you have the ability to shoot hyper lapses which is a feature that's kind of like a time-lapse but you can stay moving I filmed this whole sequence just while walking and holding the camera right in front of me also features voice commands you can do 1080p streaming on social media or on to YouTube it's got a lot of great features that I really haven't even gone into here because I don't particularly use them myself but I'm curious to know if this is something you guys would like to see me cover more often like what you can do with really powerful tiny cameras such as the Koch bro drop me a comment and let me know I'm gonna try and get out of here before the rain starts again I'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"