Our friends over at F-Stoppers have been doing some detective work and think they may have uncovered some details about the (not even announced yet) next version of the insanely popular GoPro Hero POV camera. Taking the world by storm over the past five years and quickly become the defacto POV camera for basically ever tourist, pro skier and everyone in between, GoPro has succesfully packed more technology into their tiny camera than many professional video and photo cameras costing 20 times the price.
In addition to sealing the coffin for Contour, their lead competitor, the last GoPro - the Hero 3 - blew minds with seemingly unheard of specs for such a small package. With the ability to shoot pro-level video footage that actually looks great side-by-side with the rest of their professionally shot footage, the camera was embraced by professional cinematographers as well as millions upon millions of tourists, wanna-be's and basically anyone who has ever fancied themselves a badass and wants to show the world.
Of course this has spawned a whole new category of video - the "oh god do I really have to watch 12 minutes of this shit?" category - but that's a whole 'nother story!
The Hero 3 has been out for just under a year now and market signs (and common sense) point to a new version showing up sooner than later. Although nothing official has been announced, the F-Stoppers crew have been detecting up a storm and have made an official, and smart, sounding guess as to some of the specifications for the next GoPro, based on the specs of the upgraded circuit board that has run past GoPros.
Ambarella, the company responsible for creating GoPro’s current SoCs, has just launched their latest A9 4K Ultra HD Camera SoC. Here are the specs:
4K Ultra HD H.264 Encoder
° High Profile with B-frames for high efficiency
Super High Frame Rate Modes
° 1080p120 and 720p240 for action videography
Advanced Imaging
°700Mpixels/s oversampling performance ° Multi-exposure HDR and WDR tone mapping ° Electronic image stabilization (EIS) ° Improved MCTF with advanced sharpening
Advanced Imaging
° 700Mpixels/s oversampling performance ° Multi-exposure HDR and WDR tone mapping
Wi-FiTM Connectivity
° Remote viewfinder, playback ° Upload pictures and video to social media
So basically (for those less techie readers) what you can expect is even better quality video, much better low-light performance, higher bit-rates (better quality files), hi-speed 1080p (as opposed to 720 now) and even better wifi connectivity. Bam!
No one will know until the new camera drops but it's safe to say the next GoPro will blow even more minds. I'm just hoping for a version with swappable lenses - now that would really open up some possibilities!
