GoPro Hero7 Black

GoPro's Hero7 Black sets a new standard for in-camera stabilisation, and the quality of the footage is excellent too. I didn't really have the camera long enough to get to the bottom of everything it can do, but the headline features – great quality footage and best-in-class stabilisation – are easily enough on their own to recommend it, provided you can stomach the top-end price tag.

• Pros: Great footage, excellent stabilisation, easy to use, good connectivity
• Cons: Audio is average; attaching an external mic requires a £50 accessory

Great quality footage with excellent stabilisation

Mostly what you want to know from an action camera review is: is the footage any good? To which the answer here is, yes. It's probably the best I've seen from an action camera. Given that the Hero7 Black is at the top of the market, and GoPro has long been offering really good quality from its cameras, that's perhaps no surprise.

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HyperSmooth is the big draw for the Hero7 Black. It's not available on the other two, cheaper, Hero7 builds and it claims to take in-camera stabilisation to a new level. And it pretty much delivers on that promise. Here's a quick compilation of footage from a day-long ride down to Ilfracombe and a dip in the freezing sea the next day. All the footage was taken with the camera in hand, on the end of a £1 selfie stick from Poundland, or attached to a floating handle for the shots in the sea. In total I shot about half an hour of footage across the course of a day, and that was more or less a battery's worth.

The first thing you notice is that the footage really is exceptionally smooth. Using a selfie stick usually smooths out the footage a bit anyway, but in terms of smoothness it's hard to see how most of the opening riding sequence could really be improved in that regard. The quality of the footage (shot in 1080/60 for this video) is excellent too: lots of sharpness and detail, and the camera copes well with shooting into the sun. The Hero7 will shoot in 4K up to 60fps.

If you take the camera in hand – which I did for the café section and some of the riding footage after that – then the footage isn't quite as smooth, but it's still pretty good, and miles better than most action cameras I've used.

The beach and bodyboarding footage is also excellent. What it doesn't show is how much less of a faff it is to have a camera that's fully waterproof without using an enclosure. You get better footage, because you're not adding another lens element, and it's much easier to use the camera, and to see the display. You can use the touchscreen in the water too, although it doesn't work quite so well when it's wet.

Controlling the camera through the buttons and the touchscreen is fairly straightforward, although sometimes I got a bit lost in the menus. Still images, timelapse and burst photos are available as well as various resolutions of video at various shutter speeds. You can have 1080p footage up to 240fps in wide view – although the camera can't do that and HyperSmooth at the same time – and 120fps at 2.7k resolution.

A lot of the modes are accessible from voice commands too: you can tell the camera to shoot in video, timelapse, burst and photo mode. You can turn the camera on and off too. I found that the voice controls mostly worked well, although wind noise when you're riding at speed interferes a bit.

Sound quality is okay from the internal microphone, but audio is never the highlight of an action camera. If you want to connect an external microphone you need both the microphone and GoPro's own adapter, which is another £50. If you're using the Hero7 as your primary camera for anything and being able to hear what's going on is important, you'll need to factor that in. And some kind of frame to hold the adapter and the microphone, too.

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The Hero7 is Bluetooth and WiFi enabled, and you can get at your footage in a number of ways. If you have a GoPro Plus subscription ($4.99/mo) then you can auto-upload it to the cloud when you're on WiFi. The subscription has other benefits too: it acts as an insurance policy so you can get a replacement camera if you break yours, and you get 50% off accessories if you buy them from GoPro. No: the Karma drone doesn't count as an accessory, since you're asking.

You can also cut together videos using the QuikStories app on your phone. Pick a bunch of shots, tell the app where the highlights are, pick a theme and it'll bung them all together. I found it a bit hit and miss: on longer shots it was okay, but on shorter bits of footage it too often included bits where I was fiddling with the camera or it was pointing at the sky. I intended to uses QuikStories to put the video above together, but in the end I found it a bit fiddly and reverted to a desktop video app.

For short, quick edits – the clue's in the name, I guess – it's certainly something you could learn to use and get decent results from. The Hero7 Black also allows you to stream live to Youtube and Facebook, which wasn't something I managed to try during testing.

Overall: Expensive but worth it if high-quality footage is a priority

I was pretty sad when I had to give the Hero7 back, and I didn't really have it long enough to get to grips with all of its features. I did have it long enough to recognise that it's a quality bit of kit, though. Not everyone needs their footage to be this good, but I'm sure everyone would like it to be. Whether that's worth £380 of your hard-earned (£330 on gopro.com at the moment) is for you to decide: you can get some pretty good cameras for a lot less than this, but this is the best action camera I've used thus far, and it might well be the best one there currently is.

Verdict

Best-in-class image stabilisation and great image quality from GoPro's top dollar unit