The GoPro Hero 13 Black is a fine and very solid camera capable of a lot more than just high action sports shooting, though it’s really just a gentle evolution from the GoPro Hero 12 Black.
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Larger battery lasts longer | Incompatible with older GoPro batteries |
Interchangeable lenses are very securely mounted | Actually mounting lens is quite tricky |
GPS tagging is back | Video quality drops in low light situations |
Score: 4/5
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Buy The GoPro Hero 13 Black! | Buy On Amazon |
In this review
GoPro Hero 13 Black Design
GoPro Hero 13 Black Performance
GoPro Hero 13 Black Battery
GoPro Hero 13 Black Conclusion
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Every time I review one of GoPro’s camera models, I have to make it clear that I’m not in the group of folks who adore jumping out of planes, scaling vertical cliff faces without ropes (or even with them) or taunting sharks as they pull off sick moves in the surf. That’s long been GoPro’s core constituency, but that’s just not… me.
OK, OK… mostly not me. Most of the time.
Instead, I’ve long assessed GoPro’s cameras as straight up vlogging tools for people who want or need a more robust quality video camera for purposes like recording travel adventures.
The short form here is that the GoPro Hero 13 Black is a very good, highly capable and extremely durable video camera, though for those of us who aren’t putting it to the most extreme levels of usage, or folks who don’t want to drop the additional money on accessories – especially additional lenses – there’s arguably not much reason to upgrade from the GoPro Hero 12 Black or even the GoPro Hero 11 Black.
To test it out, I once again travelled to Japan – at my own expense, this wasn’t a sponsored jaunt – to indulge in a little travel vlogging, so my review will include a few key clips from there, along with my observations about where the GoPro Hero 13 Black improves on its predecessors – and where GoPro really needs to step up its videography game.
Ethical disclaimer GoPro sent me the GoPro Hero 13 Black and a slew of accessories including mounts and lenses used in this review, and I don’t believe it’s going to ask for them back. As always, that gets them a review… and that’s all, but I do think that transparent and upfront disclosure is a necessary and all too often overlooked matter. Now, on with the review.
Design
GoPro’s design style for its action cameras hasn’t changed in basically forever, and the GoPro Hero 13 Black does not buck that trend.
This isn’t because GoPro’s designers are asleep at the drafting board, but simply because there’s a whole ecosystem of accessories that work off a standardised design. Making big physical changes would make a whole host of those accessories redundant, and the action/vlogging space is rife with competitors that I’m pretty sure GoPro doesn’t want to give any attention to by annoying its existing user base.
What all that means is that side by side with older GoPro models, beyond the “13 Black” printed on the side (in blue, because sure, why not?) there’s little to differentiate it out. It has the same hard rubber power and shot buttons as your primary physical controls, along with a 2.27 inch primary touch display, plus a smaller 1.4 inch front display to show subjects what’s being filmed. So far, so familiar.
The number “13” gives away that this is the GoPro Hero 13 Black… and that’s about all.
Being purely pedantic – it’s something I do all too often – GoPro can at least call the GoPro Hero 13 Black the “Black” model where the Hero 12 Black was more black with weird little blue sprinkles in it. That was a purely aesthetic call on GoPro’s part, but it always made me think that the GoPro Hero 12 Black was grubby in some way. Maybe it was a psychological trick to make me clean the camera more often?
New to the lineup is the possibility for magnetic mounting of accessories as well, though that does rely on a magnetic latch mount adaptor, which I wasn’t able to test for this review.
Rugged is of course the name of the game here, though with a very interesting caveat in play. The GoPro Hero 13 Black is stated as being “waterproof” up to 33 feet (because GoPro is a US-based company, so naturally they use imperial measurements, don’t get me started…) which equates to around 10 metres in real world scientific measurement terms.
All well and good and people surf and dive with them all the time, right? Sure, they do, however, as I noted in my guide to water resistance in gadgets, “waterproof” has a specific meaning, and Australian consumer law is a touch… twitchy about such things, especially when you consider that GoPro’s warranty specifically doesn’t cover water ingress damage.
I’m not a lawyer and this is not strictly speaking legal advice, but it feels to me that if your GoPro Hero 13 Black stopped working after a shallow dive in Australia for a model purchased locally with them making the “waterproof” claim, you’d probably have a good case to mount. I wouldn’t want to have to go through the stress of that, mind you.
Performance
In order to test out the GoPro Hero 13 Black, I headed to Japan for some in-depth testing over three weeks of travel.
Straight away, I made a mistake. One of the accessories that GoPro did provide me with was “The Handler”, a lightweight floating hand grip that I was planning to use as my effective grip through the snowy climes of Hokkaido especially.
I unpacked it in my office, put it to the side… and completely forgot to actually pack it in my rather heavily tracked suitcase.
Thankfully, while much older GoPro Hero cameras relied on GoPro’s particular secure mounting system, the GoPro Hero 13 Black also has a standard tripod mount screw hole within its base. One quick trip to a 100Y store (yes, it was that one) and I had a cheap tripod mount that I could try to do my best with.
The presence of this standard tripod screw mount absolutely saved me on this trip.
Take a look at this video, shot walking around the Nintendo Store in Kyoto to see just how well the GoPro Hero 13 Black handles stabilisation even when on the cheapest possible handheld grip. It’s impressive performance given those constraints!
The one caveat here is that the tripod screw hole isn’t a new design feature. It’s a feature that GoPro introduced with the older GoPro Hero 12 Black.
Being in Hokkaido also meant that I was exposing the GoPro Hero 13 Black (and myself) to some quite cold temperatures, though nothing outside the claimed specifications of the camera.
It was… cold. I could feel it, and I’m sure the GoPro Hero 13 Black could feel it too.
Here the GoPro Hero 13 Black again handled itself well; this video shot in Otaru on quite a snowy day shows that off nicely:
I actually stopped filming there because I was simply shivering too much, even layered up, and that’s when the really heavy snow started falling, too. Even leaving it in the snow for a few minutes didn’t particularly stress it in terms of shooting ability.
The GoProHero 13 Black features a new interchangeable lens system with the promise of the camera automatically detecting when you add any of the new Ultra Wide, Anamorphic, ND Filter or Macro lenses. I tested out the Ultra Wide lens on a trip to Matsushima Bay, with some impressive results – and the predictable ultra wide warping at the sides of the image:
The lenses naturally enough cost extra, and kitting out the GoPro Hero 13 Black with all of them would be a pricey endeavour. The one issue I had here is that switching the lenses can be quite a chore.
While the basics of twisting one lens off, lining up the dots on the lens and camera and twisting the new lens on isn’t complex, getting it to properly work without feeling like you’re going to break the camera is a trickier matter than I’d really like. I get that it’s all in service of keeping the GoPro Hero 13 Black as water resistant as possible, but it’s certainly not easy.
The GoPro Hero 13 Black has some new tricks, but it ultimately relies on the same 27MP sensor that GoPro has been using for some generations.
One of the areas where I found GoPro had made some improvements with the GoPro Hero 11 Black was in low light performance, though clearly this was in its own post-processing internally. On the same hardware with a few software tweaks, could the GoPro Hero 13 Black similarly impress with improved low light shooting?
In short.. no.
I can illustrate this no better than with this low light video, shot mostly in Sapporo once the sun had set.
It’s certainly representational, but is it good? No, it is not.
This does put the GoPro Hero 13 Black into an awkward position where it can be very good for shooting in fine lighting conditions, but it’s just nowhere near as good if the light struggles.
One of the features that GoPro omitted from the GoPro Hero 12 Black was GPS geotagging, if you’re the type that likes that kind of metadata in your video footage. The good news if that is you that it’s back.
Honestly, it’s not a big feature for me, so I always tended to disable it on the GoPro Hero 11 Black to conserve battery power – so no prizes for guessing what I did with the GoPro Hero 13 Black too. Still, more features in a newer camera is typically a better thing, and use cases can vary widely.
Speaking of use cases varying widely, it’s become ever more apparent that a big part of GoPro’s pitch and business model works around its subscription tier and mobile apps.
I noted in my review of the GoPro Hero 12 Black that there was a specific issue around using a GoPro Hero camera with a Mac, because Image Capture wouldn’t grab any file from the camera above 4.29GB in size. GoPro did come up with a solution for that via its GoPro Quik app for Mac, which simplified matters, though it required a GoPro subscription to download. Problem solved, right?
Yeah, right up until GoPro decided to completely discontinue the GoPro Quik app for Mac, in favour of mobile solutions only.
If you’re using and editing on a Mac then the more brute force “pop the microSD card” solution out does work nicely if you didn’t already have the Quik app installed, I found.
Battery
While externally the GoPro Hero 13 Black has the exact same form factor as prior GoPro Hero models, that’s not true once you forcefully pop the side door open. Inside, as with prior GoPro models you’ll find a microSD card slot and USB connector, but also the new 1900mAh “Enduro” battery.
On the plus side, GoPro’s claim is that the new Enduro battery can allow for up to 1.5 hours of 5K 30fps recording, or more than 2.5 hours of 1080p 30fps recording before sputtering to a halt, up from the older Enduro battery models.
That could be true depending on your shooting plans. While most of my vlogging was in shorter bursts of shooting and GoPro did supply me with a spare battery that I took with me throughout my Japan trip, I basically never had to swap over the batteries unless I was quite lazy and didn’t plug the camera in overnight while I was sleeping.
I could easily grab an hour’s worth of footage in a day and not particularly stress the battery, outside of the couple of times when I accidentally bumped the shutter button with the camera in an already stuffed jacket pocket. That set it to recording rather dull footage of the inside of my pocket (I’ll spare you those thrills) while sapping the battery away and heating the camera up, because it had nowhere to vent its heat at all.
The colder winter weather in Japan did mean I somewhat benefitted from a cooler running camera most of the time, though I’m long aware of the GoPro habit of heating up, especially after longer shoots.
This was a rather more forceful impromptu test of that, so it totally can still happen. One tiny silver lining here, if one exists at all; a GoPro Hero 13 Black that’s accidentally shot 25+ minutes of the inside of your pocket makes an excellent hand warmer in sub-zero temperatures.
That’s probably not a use case that GoPro itself would recommend, however.
However, the downside to all this expanded battery goodness, hand warming aside, is that the new Enduro battery is a slightly different shape and its connector pins are in an entirely different location on the battery.
That means it’s not compatible with older GoPro Hero cameras, and older Enduro batteries will not work with the GoPro Hero 13 Black at all. That’s a change from prior generations, where you could switch around batteries at will.
GoPro Hero 13 Black : Alex’s Verdict
The GoPro Hero 13 Black is a good and very solid camera for its money, but it’s just a gentle evolution of what the company has produced previously.
The expanded battery life is arguably its best “new” feature, but it’s one that does leave owners of older GoPro Hero cameras rather out in the dark thanks to its incompatibility.
Interchangeable lenses can give you some very unique looks for your video, but at an additional cost and with the challenge of switching lenses out on the fly not being quite as vlogging-friendly as it might be.
GoPro Hero 13 Black: Pricing and availability
The GoPro Hero 13 Black retails in Australia for $649 outright, with other accessories such as lenses, additional batteries and mounts costing extra again.
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Buy The GoPro Hero 13 Black! | Buy On Amazon |
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