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Another Autumn, another GoPro. It's come to feel as regular as leaves turning colors and hideous sweaters coming out of storage. The GoPro Hero 8, announced today, is available for pre-order now and will ship October 15.
This year the Hero 8 gets a new form factor with a shorter lens extension and built-in mounting rings. That's right, you can mount your GoPro on your helmet or handlebars without the cumbersome cage. It's the first major redesign the Hero has seen in quite a few releases.
With the cage out of the way, GoPro has created a way to add accessories to trick out your camera. The new "Mods," as GoPro calls them, use a rubberized band wrapped around the camera body to attach accessories. GoPro has three accessories to go along with the launch of the Hero 8, but with two cold shoes available to add-ons, look for third-party accessory makers to jump on this quick, extending the action camera to new realms.
### Breaking out of the Cage
The new cageless mounting design consists of folding mount rings on the bottom of the camera which tuck away into recesses when not needed. It makes the overall experience of using a GoPro less cumbersome. There's nothing in the way of changing batteries or memory cards, both of which share space in the new, single side hatch. It's a tight fit, larger hands are going to have a hard time getting the MicroSD card in and out, but it's less cumbersome than taking off the cage every time you want to change the battery.
The less welcome trade off is the loss of the HDMI port. You can get the HDMI port back with the Media Mod ($80), GoPro's basic add-on, which will also get you a 3.5mm mic port and two cold shoes (the "cold" in cold shoe means that the mount point does not provide power, as opposed to a hot shoe which does).
The Hero 8 is marginally larger to accommodate the fold away mount rings, but not enough to make it much different in the hand. It's slightly larger than the Hero 7, but smaller than the Hero 7 with its mounting cage.
The cageless design, even without the HDMI port, is a welcome change—one of those changes that makes you wonder why it wasn't this way all along—but I'm less convinced about the new lens and housing.
The new lens design changes the shape of the lens housing (it's now square, your old filters will not fit), and the cover is no longer removable or replaceable. GoPro has beefed up the glass on the cover, it's now 2mm Gorilla glass, but this is a camera that typically lives a rough and tumble life and the removable lens of the Hero 7 was an insurance policy against damage that the Hero 8 lacks.
GoPro does sell a tempered-glass protective cover for both the lens and the back, which I highly recommend if you're using your GoPro the way, well, the way you're supposed to.
### Mod Madness
||||||Mods image here ||||||
The big win of the cageless design for many will be the new "Mods" or accessories that can be added to the Hero 8. These start with what GoPro calls the Media Mod, which adds the aforementioned mic jack, cold shoes, HDMI port, and a shotgun mic. This is the base mount to which other accessories can be attached. Currently GoPro also offers a light and a flip up screen for previews and help framing those selfie shots.
The new Hero 8 design and accessories make it feel like GoPro's target market is shifting from the strap-it-to-your-head-and-shred crowd to the vlogging crowd. It's a move that makes sense from a market size standpoint—YouTube has a lot more vlogging than shredding going on—but also it also speaks to how well GoPro has already solved the shredding side of the equation.
And the Hero 8 does have some new features that will tempt those who put the action in action camera, notably the improved HyperSmooth stabilization and the wind-optimized microphone. The former is incrementally better, but the fact that it's not earth-shatteringly better speaks to how good the first version was. HyperSmooth 2 is available in all video modes.
Almost all the software-based features of the GoPro have been updated and improved. HDR handling in SuperPhoto looks more natural and does a better job with moving subjects (which tend to be blurry when combining images for an HDR). TimeWarp and TimeLapse have both been updated, the former gains an auto mode that makes "time warp" style videos much easier to create.
I was also happy to find that RAW images are available in all photo modes, including time lapse (RAW images still only work with the wide lens setting since all the other lens modes are software created).
### Customize Everything
While the new hardware design is slick, and the various in-camera software improvements make the Hero 8 even easier for non-pro users, the single best thing about the Hero 8 in my view is the new ability to customize menus.
The GoPro's screen is tiny and not the best touch screen you've ever used. Tapping a tiny screen while treading water or standing in the icy winds atop a [cornice of snow](https://www.wired.com/story/tips-for-action-cameras-skiing-and-snowboarding/) is not anyone's idea of fun. The less you have to interact with the touchscreen that better and with the new menu customization I hardly touched it at all.
In previous releases tapping the currently selected presets would open up the setting page and you could change what you needed to change. It was cumbersome and there was almost no customization possible. The Hero 8 swings the other way, allowing you to customize everything. Tap the currently selected preset and you'll get a list of all your presets, making it super simple to switch between video modes with all your favorite settings dialed in.
You can even customize which options show up on the home screen for each preset. At first it's almost overwhelming, but once you spend some time setting up everything the way you want it, it makes day-to-day use so much easier. Again it feels like the way things should have always been. Quickly switching settings means less fiddling.
Less fiddling feels like a running theme to the changes between the Hero 7 and the new Hero 8. GoPro has addressed the pain points in the Hero 7, improved the software, and with a nod to selfie-stick wielding video crowd, has turned out a camera that's better for action and vlogging alike.
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