Hi everybody! This is Run The Joules. This is our long-term GoPro Hero 9 Black review.
There it is. Does it suck? Should you spend your money on it? should you wait to see whatever is
next from gopro? We've got some pretty solid opinions on it after months and months of
use -- and of course this channel is all about bringing multiple perspectives on all the product
reviews we'll be doing. Yeah and i can tell you right now the way Degju you uses this camera
is completely different from the way that i use this camera. So um, let's get into it.
We chose this canyon to do a walk and talk -- why just sit at a desk when you can go for a walk and
talk about all this stuff -- so the only problem with trying to do a walking talk in a canyon is
uh this canyon's gnarly. My wife and i we run a full-time youtube channel about mountain biking
it's called The Loam Ranger channel and so we use our gopros for our jobs and before we started
that youtube channel we were professional photographers and videographers for about
10 years, so we have pretty specific tastes for what cameras work for us and what cameras don't
and i push my GoPros to the very very limit and so for me i got this right out of the gate i was
one of the first people to grab the camera from the store and so i've seen how it's progressed
from the first firmware to the latest one so that's my end of it and deju is pretty different
gopro running sweet i've only used it for this month yeah you just started using that
thing yeah i just started using it and took it on uh recently a canoe camping trip so
three days of usage where i used uh photos video stabilization all of that sorry i just got really
distracted look it's like we're in minecraft look at these blocks they're like perfectly
cut that's amazing yeah anyways nature so here's the thing about the camera it's gonna be a pretty
good camera for everybody it's got pretty great features in basically every situation but as we
said at the beginning of the video everybody's a little bit different with what they need out of it
and so there's gonna be all these like little differences between the 9 and the 8 and the 7
and like the insta360 1r and those types of things that's where kind of the real deciding
factors are what some people really love about the 9 other people are going to hate about it
the camera is definitely bigger than it was before if i try and mount it you know like a hero 8 i was
able to mount it underneath the visor of my full face riding helmet but i can't do that
with the 9 because it's so big however i love the big size because it comes with a bigger screen so
the 2.27 inch screen is just easy to to maneuver around however there are touch sensitivity issues
that i found but it looks good but it doesn't work that well the the touch screen is not super
responsive as it is right now but when that camera first got shipped the back screen was almost
unusable so they've actually put a ton of work into that it's still not as sensitive as like
the eight or the seven or whatever but uh it's getting there while it
was getting to a point when i was using it i thought i was doing something wrong
i was actually thinking it was like you know like the biggest gopro but i mean it might
be but it's also i have my hero4 black in its waterproof housing next to the hero 9.
and they're basically the exact same size yeah so i think we're just starting to get spoiled
the eight is so compact it's so lightweight it's so thoughtfully designed minus the one
big caveat and that's the non-replaceable lens on the eight and they went back to the replaceable
lens for the nine which is a huge deal uh which is a big bonus for buying the nine over the eight
i loved having the screen especially with with our group um i was able to make sure everyone was in
the frame for selfies so you found it truly useful having that front screen definitely that's cool
yeah you know what when i first got the camera i didn't really care about that front screen
i didn't think i was ever going to use it but for me in the mountain bike scenario
when i've got it set up on a chest mount being able to just check the angle by looking down
at that front screen super super helpful and i really really appreciate that feature
so gopro claims that their new battery is thirty percent better than the eight
i use it extensively on this three day trip yep and i went through three batteries about one a day
um not fully but i use it extensively paddling for six hours hiking this next day for a few hours
and just general it's like pretty heavy usage yeah yeah photos everything so which is amazing
yeah it really is like that's it's definitely one of the very best things about the hero 9
if you need lots of battery life from a single battery but this is where it kind of diverges a
little bit with with what camera is going to be better for which people let's put it this way if
you're somebody who does a lot of action kind of stuff in the summertime or just mostly use
the gopro in the summer time you're not gonna notice as big of a battery difference the nine
does run longer than the eight and the seven and the six and the five and definitely the four the
four battery life is freaking terrible it's the worst so worse the real big difference shows up
when the when the temperature drops so if you're somebody that uses the camera
in the winter time fairly often or even just in colder temperatures uh the nine is the ticket that
bigger battery size lasts much longer in colder weather on this trip we were in the back country
and we're right under a glacier and so we were in glacier cold water and my wife carrie strapped it
on the chest mount and dove in and other times as well she did swim in the glacier lake water yeah
with no problems at all i feel like with the hero4 black if you just if you like drank some a little
bit of slurpee and then breathed on instantly died yeah yeah so battery life it's a big deal it makes
the camera bigger so if that is a big deal for you for like mounting under a visor the eight's
probably the better bet for you but overall yeah it's a huge plus the battery life for the hero 9.
well good oh good everything's fine
so from a new user's perspective and somebody who hasn't had any other digitally stabilized gopros
he's got nothing but good things to say about it me on the other hand i've been using him for years
and i'm a spoiled brat by this point and i i use like the other types of gimbals and stuff so one
thing i will say is that the digital stabilization on the hero9 black is extremely shutter speed
hungry and what i mean by that is it really really needs fast shutter speeds in order to do its work
so let me clarify my thoughts on this the gopro hero 9 black has the best digital image
stabilization of i believe any action camera out there any single lens action camera out there but
that statement only applies in well-lit situations with nice bright light the moment you get into any
kind of a dimly lit situation the hero9 black hypersmooth 3.0 needs such fast shutter speeds
to do its work that you'll either lose that great stabilization altogether because the camera just
can't do its job with slower shutter speeds or it has to crank its own iso settings way
way up there and you wind up with a really mushy gross looking image and in all my testing and in
my years of using these cameras i firmly believe that the hero 9 image falls apart much faster than
the hero 8 or even the hero 7 black so if you're someone who lives say in the pacific northwest and
you find yourselves you know deep in the forest all the time where the light levels are pretty low
um you might have a bit of a harder time and you might not be all that impressed with the image
quality out of the hero 9 black just because that that high iso digital noise but you know if you're
if you're somewhere like in arizona or something and the light is always good and you're not under
tree cover all the time or even under light tree cover it's going to look great it's going
to be nice and crisp you're not going to have that digital noise and the stabilization will
be fantastic on this camera another thing from my perspective is the flat color picture profile in
the camera um is not all that flat especially not compared to a camera like the hero4 black
when you set the camera to a flat picture profile you you're not looking for the super
punchy contrasty look you don't want all the crazy saturated colors you want it kind of
flat like how this camera is set right now this canon i have like a custom uh profile on there and
that's what i'm looking for from a flat profile and it seems every single year gopro is making
their flat color picture profile contrastier and contrastier and contrastier and what that means
for me on my end when i'm editing is that i just i'm i don't have the same amount of flexibility
for saving highlights and shadows depending on the light lighting situation that i'm in
and of course you know a huge factor when thinking about whether or not to buy this
camera is how does it compare to other cameras not only to other gopros but to other cameras from
different manufacturers like insta 360 or uh dji and so i can tell you from experience i've used
pretty much all of the modern insta360 cameras especially on the side of audio on the audio
side of things with a couple of little tweaks nothing really touches the gopro for quality for
image stabilization they're both decently close but the gopro still wins out with their newest
hyper smooth overall as a as a complete package since the hero 7 black gopro has had it over
pretty much every other competitor for overall quality of their cameras for stabilization for
color um for pro options even though you know it's getting a little less pro over the years
but for a straight up single lens action camera you probably just want to go gopro
so should you buy this camera now or should you wait for the next one this is where i stand on it
let me know if you agree or not if you are the average user looking to get a camera right now
in the summer of 2021 or even the fall of 2021 and you want to just get some nice clips of the
holidays those sorts of things i think the hero 9 is great the front screen is super handy like you
were saying the battery life is good if you don't mind a little bit of a bulkier size over the hero8
it's good to go i know that there's also some nice deals on the nine right now too which typically
happens at the end of you know that first year of it being out so look around for those as well
now on the pro user end of things i'm willing to bet that you probably own one or two gopros
as it is already and in this case i would probably wait the extra a couple of months to wait and see
what's in the next iteration i would expect that on the hero 10 or whatever it's going to be that
they're going to be improving the low-light performance of this sensor i doubt that they
will change sensors but i do believe that they're either going to completely change the processor
or they're going to really tweak it to clean up the muddiness in the shadows and that sort of
digital noise and grain which is a really huge deal for people like myself and fingers crossed
they bring in real steady stabilization into the whole hyper-smooth bucket of stabilization on the
camera itself and that would be really really worth waiting for from a pro user's perspective
well that is that that is the long-term review of the hero 9 black from gopro if you found
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