GoPro Hero9 Black Review – Simultaneously Good, Bad, and Ugly

Introduction:

I’ve been using the GoPro Hero9 Black intermittently for several months now. I’ve got some strong and divided opinions about it. I purchased a bundle with the floating hand grip, swivel clip, spare battery, SD card, and cloud subscription back on October 20, 2020. I later purchased the dual battery charger that came with another battery.

This purchase was made because my old GoPro-like camera, a Garmin Virb that I got in 2017, never had that great of color to begin with and started to take lame videos with loss of color the older it got. The waterproof housing’s metal joint also started to rust.

The Good:

Great 4k video for a waterproof camera.
Great colors.
TimeWarp and time lapses are great.
Night lapses are great.
Horizon leveling and HyperSmooth is awesome.

The Bad:

Several times the GoPro wouldn’t power on without holding both buttons for ten seconds. The first time it happened, that wouldn’t even work and the battery had to be taken out and put back in before that would work.
Having to take the Micro SD card out to copy the video to your computer. The alternative is to upload the video to the GoPro cloud, then download it. This is covered in The Ugly section.
Battery life isn’t good. In fact, it’s bad. That would be why it’s in the bad section. It’s good that I have three batteries for it.
The touchscreen. Often non-responsive.

The Ugly:

The GoPro cloud. Utterly useless tools and viewer and you can only connect to it about half the time. Trash.
The application. Where do I even begin and should I even write up everything that’s wrong with it? It’s utterly useless too. Trash.
Connecting to the camera via the app. It works except it doesn’t. Trash. Fortunately, you can connect to the camera and select the Preferences wrench to find the setting to format the Micro SD card, which is labeled “Delete all files from SD card” and is all the way at the bottom. You can’t do this in the camera. Everything else you try to do through the app is greeted with a message that says “Possible Connection Issue” and “We can’t connect to your GoPro due to a potential Wi-Fi issue.” However, you can power it off via your phone instead of pressing the power off button on the camera if that means anything.
Updating the camera firmware via phone. The app helpfully and immediately tells you when there’s a camera update available. Selecting Update Camera does nothing except say “Reconnecting to Colin GoPro”. Trash.
Manually updating the camera’s firmware. The GoPro site wants you to register your camera’s serial number and give them your email address. Doing so results in the web page doing nothing. Trash.
Trying to just login to the GoPro site now. Does nothing. I wonder if I’ll even be able to cancel my cloud subscription now. Is GoPro out of business or something? What the fuck is even going on? Trash.

Conclusion:

This would be a good camera if connecting to it wasn’t the most frustrating thing I’ve ever experienced. This camera was made in 2020, not 2000. Coincidentally, I’ve been working in Information Technology since 2000 and I know it should not be this hard. The fact that I can’t do it after trying again weeks after the firmware update came out and months after the camera came out along with extensive troubleshooting means it’s total fucking trash. Also, the fact that I can’t update the firmware after encountering the weird hardware issue is alarming.

Grade: D-

Unfortunately for GoPro the bad experience of using the camera and trash experience of everything else trashes the camera as a whole despite its quality video output. It would get a B if it wasn’t developed around the cloud and could connect via phone and even then it should be better given the brand name and price. The next time I purchase a GoPro-like camera in the future it will be from a competitor, much like I did with the Garmin years ago. The video quality might take a hit, but all the rest would probably be a significant improvement.