GoPro Hero 4 Silver – An Aspiring Technical Pro Users Review
7. Long or Decent Battery Life
The GoPro Hero Battery Life is Decent. It’s not Great but its decent. The Battery life on the HERO 4 Silver is a lot like it was on the Hero 3+ Black Edition (or so I’m told)
The Hero 4 (Black and Silver) has a Battery capacity of 1,160 mAH @ 3.8V = 4.4Wh
The Rule of Thumb is that you’re getting about 32 GB of card writing at 2.7K Shooting and then the battery dies so about 60-68 mins or so at the most per battery. That’s only according to my experience with OEM GoPro batteries (3rd parties may vary). Obviously shooting at 1080p or lower will increase the amount of battery time you have and Shooting 4K will decrease your battery quicker. Note: as it turns out, I found out that the The Hero4 Black has the same SoC processor (The A9 versus the A7 in the Hero 3+) as the HERO4 Silver but the Silver’s had its factory clocked (Gigahertz) set lower. (if any modders are listening, I would love to see a mod project to undertake and create a “Magic Lantern-like” Firmware for the Silver as in the Canon DSLR 5D Series – but I digress)
The one good option about the Hero 4 is if you have access to power you can run the camera off of the USB cable or any other USB portable Power Pack. Depending on your rigging set up for camera, this may be an option (attaching the power pack to the tripod with a bar mount or something.
One further suggestion is to use the GoPro’s Battery pack addon, which apparently increases your battery quite a bit! I don’t fully recommend this option however due to the fact that The main benefit of using the Hero 4 Silver is because it has an LCD screen intergrated into the back of the camera. Using the Battery Bacpac will obscure the LCD. One other thing I’ve heard rumours about is that the Battery BacPac and GoPro get really Hot when using it.
But the possibilities are there for you to decide.
8. Good Night Vision or Low Light Ability
Most Cameras don’t do Low Light or Night Time Shooting very well for various reasons but the most prominent is lack of light (duh!). The GoPro however does a pretty good job good job at this. Getting Your settings correct however can be tricky.
Shooting in Protune mode is recommended (more on this later) because it can give you more control and capture more detail in the dark. The Protune mode allows you to adjust cut over limits of the ISO from 400, 1600, 3200 modes. As photographers know, the higher the ISO the more light is let in but the higher the grain or artifacts you end up with from the sensor. I switch between 400 and 1600 depending on what I’m shooting and how much light is actually in the scene.
The Low Light option in the camera basically drops the frame rate variably to allow more light while your shooting. For Pros, this doesn’t work well for workflows however may be an option for scenes where a low frame rate is the objective with constantly changing from dark areas to lighter areas. I personally have not experimented with this much yet so some testing is in order.
Also recommended is shooting at a lower frame rate in dark scenes which also helps with low light conditions. IE shooting fast moving pieces in really dark scenes is problematic at best without a LOT of Extra scene ambient lighting.
The Camera also has a digital EV exposure setting to help with darkly lit scenes boosting the camera’s sensor (digitally) to account for better lighting.
9. & 10. Decent Sound Reproduction and Good Input/output Jacks
Like all Pros, Audio really isn’t a main focus on the camera itself, usually being replaced by more expensive setups or Lavalier mics, etc. however the sound reproduction on these cameras is fairly good. One good thing is that by purchasing the GoPro microphone adapter, any 3.5mm Microphone or input you want to attach the camera is possible while shooting.
Attaching this to the camera opens up the possibility of using several External Microphones or Wireless lavalier receiver for those all important Pod/Blogcasts!
The Bad Experience: I must point out a really bad quality control and customer service experience with my first couple of GoPro Hero 4 Silvers from GoPro initially. The story apparently is that there were batches of Hero 4’s that had some audio interference issues when recording 2.7K video. The effect was a rumbling “get to the chopper ! ” type noise that was very irritating. The issue was only present after turning on the Wifi and controlling it with the GoPro App (it didn’t occur when WiFi was off). This was a very bad issue for anyone wanting to use their smart phone and control the camera from a distance and shooting in 2.7K mode (of which I originally started shooting in).
After a grueling back and forth for 2 months (this was a fairly new issue unaware to GoPro’s support staff as a main issue at the time) of dealing with customer service on the issue, I finally received a proper working version.
Initially the problem had been that I contacted GoPro support which didn’t respond within my 14 days to return period the camera to a retailer and I was locked into waiting for GoPro to analyze and finally approve sending me replacements to try. a Lesson to all who buy the GoPro from retailers… Don’t throw out your packaging and if you have a problem with it the product (and didn’t buy the extended warranty), return it to the store a soon as you can within your 14 days for another one. Starting support calls on the first week of January also never go well it seems… And if you buy a GoPro plan to spend time figuring and testing it all out before you want to go on vacation not a few weeks before…. Words of wisdom.
It’s unfortunate that GoPro’s Customer Service, quality control and accessory availability from retailers had lacked with the Product launch of the Hero 4 at the time I had the open case but now being May 2015, most issues seem to be going away (at least on the supply side of things).
The experience was not pleasant one however GoPro did end up offering me a free GoPro 3-way which I gladly accepted. I am hoping that the GoPro Hero 5 product line (yet to be announced) will take some of these customer service lessons from the Hero 4 and continue building and improving such a wonderful concept and product otherwise that gives us the consumers a remarkable product !
