GoPro Hero 9 Black: Good action camera for both amateurs and professionals

 

Priced at Rs 49,500, the Hero 9 Black is certainly the biggest action camera upgrade that GoPro has released in a long time.

From a new 23.6-megapixel sensor for 5K video recording to a dual-screen design and bigger-capacity battery, the Gorpo Hero 9 Black features that most GoPro enthusiasts had long been waiting for. Bigger than any of its previous iterations, this action camera might require some tweaking in your existing mount set-up. For example, I had to redo the J-mount set-up on the helmet to get the right point-of-view (PoV).

Though changing the mount set-up to fit the GoPro Hero 9 Black can be a bit of a hassle, the upgrades and new features justify the changes in dimension. Moreover, it has built-in mounting rings which GoPro introduced with the Hero 8 Black; they do away with the need for a camera cage to mount the camera. So, even as the camera dimensions and weight have increased, these feel like a marginal change in real-life usage.

The dual-screen design is another major change that is apparent on the GoPro Hero 9 Black. The action camera has a 2.27-inch rear touch screen with a touch zoom function on the back that shows relevant information and doubles up as a digital viewfinder, and a tiny 1.4-inch square colour screen on the front that is not information rich but covers the basics and shows live preview. The dual-screen design makes the Hero 9 Black a suitable imaging accessory fit for vloggers and social media enthusiasts, besides adventurers.

Design details aside, the Hero 9 Black brings a new 23.6-megapixel sensor capable of recording up to 5K resolution videos and capturing 20MP stills. It is a major upgrade over the predecessor’s 12MP sensor capable of recording 4K videos. The 5K resolution video might seem absurd, considering the devices we use max out at 4K resolution. However, the additional resolution here would be appreciated by content creators as they get extra pixels to play around with during production. One thing that pinches here, however, is the 30-frame-per-second (fps) limit on 5K recording; adventurers might prefer to stick to the 4K resolution as the fps goes up to 60, which is a better fit for fast-paced action recording.