GoPro unveiled its latest, impossibly small, impossibly precise, impossibly cool camera on Tuesday evening in San Francisco.
The GoPro Hero 3 gets smaller by 30 percent, faster by a factor of two, and shoots 4K video at 15 frames per second. That's cinema quality in the "black" package for $400. Add built-in Wi-Fi leveraging a GoPro app for your iPhone (Android coming soon), and you can also live-stream your images or video.
Full disclosure: I have been rooting for GoPro since founder Nick Woodman almost rode me off a poison oak-filled cliff along the Northern California coast years ago. It's a Silicon Valley company that has been built on passion, with Woodman leading the charge, and it shows.
I'll let the real WIRED gadget hounds take it through its paces, but it's insane how much is being packed into such a small package, and how far GoPro as a company has come.
Consider that after the big camera companies ignored the opportunity, this formerly tiny company from Half Moon Bay, California, now has 320 employees, a massive following in the surf, skate, snow, lawnmower riding community -- whatever your obsession is. Since 2009 the private company has sold more than 3 million of its cameras. "Nobody had invented the world's most versatile camera, and we were the ones to do it," says Woodman.
That's a boast, but Woodman has a very good point. GoPro has gone beyond surfers and other adrenaline junkies to being a camera that can capture any moment, anywhere. I have seen them deployed in the birth of children, in ambles down Manhattan streets and simple days spent lounging on the beach.
I'll be putting the GoPro 3 to its paces in some seabound adventure in the next 24 hours. Assuming I make it, I'll report back. If nothing else the camera will survive, and there will be plenty of video to comb over.
Photos: Michael V. Copeland/Wired
