GoPro Mission 1 Pro Review: 61 Things You Need to Know After Two Months of Shooting

So, this here is a brand new GoPro Mission 1 Pro, and I’ve been putting it through its paces over the last month and a half across all sorts of different scenarios to figure out where it works well and where it falls short, including how it compares to numerous other competitors in the space, as well as its older sibling, the GoPro Hero 13 Black.

In this video, I’m going to walk through everything you need to know about this camera from start to finish, what works well, what sucks, and everything in between. As always, this video is not sponsored, which is a pretty big rarity in the action cam world.

Models & Pricing

The very first thing to know then is the price. And it depends on which model you have.

There are essentially three different models of the Mission 1 series. There’s the Mission 1 Base starting at $499. Then you’ve got the Mission 1 Pro starting at $599. Then you got the Mission 1 ILS, which is the exact same as Mission 1 Pro except it has a mount on the front of it. More about that in just a second. That’s actually the same price as the Mission 1 Pro.

1-Inch Sensor & GP3 Processor

Now, with the price tidbits out of the way, let’s get into the tech. The first new thing to know here, it’s got a 1-inch quad-Bayer sensor. The idea behind this is giving it more flexibility for low light footage as well as a bigger sensor size than their competitors. That said, remember that sensor size is only one piece of the imaging pipeline puzzle.

You can have a 1-inch sensor and have a crappy action camera. We’ve seen that many, many times in the past. Instead, it’s a whole bunch of different pieces that make a good action camera. And one of those new pieces is the new GoPro GP3 SoC, or basically the brains of the camera. Think of it like the CPU, if you will, the processing of the camera and how much data they can stick through that for things like 8K 60 and then all the stabilization on top of that and all those pieces. And GoPro believes between that 1-inch sensor as well as that GP3 chipset, they have quite a bit of room to grow down the road.

ILS Model

Now, speaking of growing, one of the things you can do is grow that front lens on the Mission 1 Pro series and particularly with the interchangeable lens system. Now, this model is not yet available till later on this summer in probably the August or September time frame, but this allows you to put a Micro Four Thirds lens on the front of your GoPro. This means that you can bring that f-stop or the aperture quite a bit lower. You see, the aperture on this one here is f2.0, and that’s great for an action camera.

It’s pretty much the same ballpark as their competitors, but when you put a dedicated lens on the front of a camera, you get a much different depth of field. Now, there’s lots to talk about with the ILS model, like the lack of autofocus or lens compatibility and things like that, but given that camera isn’t here today, we’ll save that for down the road. I would note that don’t overthink the autofocus thing too much. For the most part, this camera isn’t for you. It’s for productions like Mr. Beast and others where they want to have a static camera set up somewhere for a long, long time, and they want to have like 600 to 800 of these cameras at once. This lowers the cost dramatically compared to their existing setups.

8K Video Modes & Comparison

Instead, what is for you is the new 8K modes. As for the 8K though, you essentially have three core modes there. One, you have linear footage, which is basically kind of that standard look. There’s no fisheye to it. You’ve also got the wide look, and then you got a SuperView look. Now, the cool part here is that you can shoot up to 60 frames per second, which is much faster than the competitors at 30 frames per second.

In SuperView, you are limited to 30 frames per second though as opposed to the 60 frames. But equally, you can shoot much wider than their competitors because their competitors can’t do those ultra wide looks like GoPro can with the SuperView at 8K30. You can also shoot either 16×9 or 4×3. The key benefit to 8K footage is really just to be able to play back at 8K, as nice as that may be, giving you more flexibility in post-production to crop into the actual scene portion that you want.

In terms of the quality of the 8K footage, you can see it’s definitely better than DJI and Insta360’s, likely because it’s a newer generation of sensors. In the case of DJI, they kind of added it after the fact via firmware update. And in the case of Insta360, they added it actually quite a while back, but it was always sort of like an extra “so 8K” thing. I suspect over the course of the next year, we’ll see both those companies add proper 8K resolutions and we’ll probably see them match what GoPro has today.

Slow-Mo (1080p/960FPS & 4K/240FPS)

Next up are some shifts to frame rates. So, in the case of 4K, you can now shoot up to 240 frames per second. And in the case of 1080p, up to 480 frames per second. This is a big jump up from the past, which is 120 frames per second and what all their current competitors are on right now. You can see in this cannonball example right here, shot at 4K 240 on the GoPro, but the others are limited to 120 frames per second, giving more flexibility there.

But instead, the real kicker is the new 1080p 960 frames per second mode for up to 10 seconds. So, you have this burst mode that you can shoot up to 10 seconds. Just watch this cannonball shot here. This is absolutely mind-boggling. I’ve skipped ahead to the part my wife’s about to enter the water there. Not because the splash isn’t cool, but the secondary splash once that first wave of the cannonball water comes over is just insane.

Now, keep in mind here that depending on what device you’re looking at, this will look either decent or so. So, if you’re on a phone, this will look amazing. If you’re on a big 50-inch TV, you’re gonna be like, “Yeah, the quality isn’t super awesome.” Again, you’re almost shooting a thousand frames per second here. This is just unreal compared to basically everything else in the market in the action cam realm.

Low Light Comparison

Next, GoPro finally delivers improved low light performance. I think people have been asking for it for many, many years, and it is finally here using that 1-inch sensor in combination with the GP3 chipset and everything else below it.

Now, as you can see from these samples side by side here, this essentially puts it in the same ballpark as Insta360 and DJI. It is leagues ahead of the Hero 13 Black across pretty much every low light scenario. Now, you are probably noticing differences in some of the coloring, especially like on this sunset shot right here in the harbor. There’s definite differences between all these cameras and how they interpret colors. Likewise, each camera handles different low light scenarios better or worse. I think in general, this is pretty much in the same ballpark as Insta360 and DJI.

I think there are certain scenarios where GoPro is going to handle slightly better than the others and certain scenarios where DJI and Insta360 are going to handle it slightly better than GoPro. On the whole though, it’s mostly a wash from all the footage I’ve seen thus far over the last month and a half. The thing is the low light mode is now usable for stuff like this. In the past, GoPros would have been totally useless for this. Not that I would normally shoot out here in the dark like this or in other low light settings. Mostly going to use my phone for that, but in this case, I can do that without any problems with the GoPro. And again, it’s mostly usable footage.

To me, the main benefit here isn’t so much shooting at night. I think for most of us, we’re just going to simply grab our phones to shoot at night in most cases. Action stuff at night rarely works out. Instead, it’s really the true low light scenarios. See, just after sunset scenario, things like that. That’s where this camera will shine compared to a Hero 13 in the past.

Open Gate Support

The next new feature is open gate support. Now, this is kind of a funny one because this is all about marketing, right? GoPro has actually had open gate support in their cameras for many, many years. They just didn’t name it that. They didn’t market that. When DJI added this into the Action 6, influencers everywhere went crazy, not realizing it was already there in GoPro’s cameras for years, but now they’ve named it a proper mode so that you can just tap it and see it there. In the past, you just would have chosen 8×7 mode and increased the bit rate and all that kind of stuff. Here, it just does it in one tap for you.

But at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. So, as an example of how you might use OpenGate footage, I can do a 16×9 crop out of this or I can do a 9×16 crop vertically. This gives you more area to play with in post-production.

Field of View Changes

Speaking of more area to play with, the FOV or field of view has been increased slightly on the Mission 1 Pro. One of the things that’s notable though as part of this is that HyperView is now gone. That mode disappeared entirely because SuperView is actually now wider than the HyperView was. Generally speaking, HyperView had this like really fast moving thing where they squish stuff in a little bit more to make it feel faster. There might be some scenarios where you’d still like that, but for now that wider perspective is there already.

Subject Tracking Mode

Next up is the new subject tracking mode. This is something we’ve seen in various handheld gimbals and things like that over the last couple years. It allows you to track a person, or typically a person, automatically. In the case of GoPro, they’re using the wider angle of the lens and then cropping into that to get the automatic tracking like you see right here, my daughter running around in circles. So, it’s basically going to zoom in and kind of pan around and whatnot. And it’s useful in these sort of static scenarios.

For myself personally, I don’t tend to shoot this sort of thing all that much. I tend to be out on a bike running or riding or out in the ocean, etc. So, it’s not super useful there because you’re just moving too much to be all that practical, but in a court type scenario like this, it could be useful. That said, as you can see here, it does mistake my shadow for her a few times, but this is also like a super bright summer sharp shadow on the grass that’s not all that different than what she probably looks like to the camera.

GPLog2 & Higher Bit Rate Support

Next up, a few quick geeky things and we’ll get back to non-geeky things. First up, they’ve added a new 240 megabit per second bit rate mode, which is almost double what it used to be in the past. In fact, you can go up to 300 megabits per second in GoPro Labs, more about that later on.

On top of that, they’ve added the new GoPro GP-Log 2. This is essentially their log format. So, if you want to do full color correction after the fact, you can do that. GP-Log 2 does give you more range than GP-Log 1 did, so you should see improvements there. They’ve also increased the display on the back from 2.27 inches to 2.59 inches. And of course, with that is the larger camera, both physically as well as weight-wise. Here is kind of a comparison to the other ones from a size standpoint as well as the weight perspective.

Screen Size, Dimensions & Weight

A lot of people have asked whether or not I’ve noticed the heavier camera. Yeah, sure. Like when you pick it up, it is obviously heavier. Have I noticed it out and about from an action scenario, whether it be swimming or biking or running or flight boarding or whatever else I wanted? No, not at all. I mean, it’s just a few grams in the grand scheme of life compared to all the other things I’ve got going on. This isn’t really an issue. Certainly, there are scenarios where that weight might matter in maybe some FPV scenarios, though most these days are more than powerful enough for this not to matter too much, except for a slight more hit on battery life.

But overall, we’re seeing the market is essentially a division of cameras into heavier ones with more capabilities and the lighter ones that have less capabilities, but are way, way smaller and lighter. I’m hoping at some point we’ll see GoPro re-enter that smaller camera realm with something much more technically capable than their current offering, which really lags behind the competitors from a features and tech standpoint.

New Lens Hood & Protective Cover

Next on the list, probably one of the most boring things, they’ve added a lens hood. It comes off right here and just simply slides back on again. You’ll probably lose it at some point. I’ve lost mine and refound mine many, many times.

Also, by the way, related to this, you can go ahead and still remove the front lens protective cover right there, just like you could in the past. So, that part is no different than it would have been in the past. Though these are different sized front lens covers there. So, keep that in mind. They’re not interchangeable to existing Hero 13 ones.

New Equilibrium Buttons & 20m Depth Rating

The next new bit here is they’ve changed the buttons. They’re much, much bigger. And the reason why I’m showing you this very carefully, if you look underneath that, you can see my face. That’s because water can now go underneath this button right there. And the same is true of this button on the side there. Making it better for deeper underwater design. This is called an equilibrium button. It ensures that as you go deeper in depth underwater, you’re not going to have issues with the buttons kind of depressing down automatically.

Now, one of the reasons for this is they’ve increased the depth rating of this to 20 m or 66 ft without a housing. So you can bring it down that deep. This new rating is essentially in the same ballpark as their competitors. Now for most scenarios, you don’t need that. Like for example, this kind of shallow free diving right here with my wife. There’s really no reason for that. In this case, I just have the cameras underwater as is and just simply cruising along. And I do that all the time without any problems at all.

New Scuba Dive Mode & New Scuba Case

That said, there is also a new dive mode itself. So this is on the software side. It’s a mode that you can select and this will automatically correct the colors for you as you go deeper in depth. So in theory, you don’t have to have additional adapters on the front of your camera or anything else there. Just the color should automatically correct.

You can see the difference here side by side to the GoPro Hero 13 Black versus the Mission 1 Pro on this dive down at about 30 m. Keeping in mind that the water quality on this day was like so-so in terms of the stuff in the water there. So, it wasn’t an ideal day overall for the dive case. I’ll have to take it out again.

Speaking of dive cases, there is a new dive case here. Looks almost like the new one except just a little bit bigger and has now vertical mounting fingers as well. There’s a lot of people that will use a bigger camera system and then put a GoPro on top to capture things in vertical. This solves for that scenario.

Revamped Custom Modes

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there is this new dive mode that comes actually a bunch of new modes as well. So, you see this whole new mode menu system here. You can duplicate modes, you can apply settings to all modes at once. So, you can copy a setting and then apply it to everything. A lot more customization than you had in the past from a modes perspective. And there’s also these new dedicated modes like the dive mode there or the open gate mode, etc., that are kind of like pre-canned modes out of the box.

Sport POV Mode

On top of that, there’s a new sport POV mode, very similar to what we saw in the GoPro Max 2 that was announced last year. GoPro says this will account for dynamics a little bit better in fast turning type scenarios, so you’re not going beyond kind of the stabilization limits. It’s a really hard one to show side by side. You’re mostly going to use this in well, POV type scenarios like this right here, mountain biking.

New Enduro 2 Battery & Fast Charging

Next up is the new GoPro Enduro 2 battery. So, this battery has longer battery life as you can see right here on this chart. But more notably, it’s also fully backwards compatible with the existing GoPro Hero 13 Black, meaning you can take Hero 13 Black batteries and put them in the Mission 1 camera or vice versa. You actually get a little bit more battery life in the Hero 13 because it’s just simply a bigger capacity battery.

In fact, with that is fast charging. Finally, I’ve been waiting for fast charging for years on the GoPro. You’re basically going to get to about 80% of the battery in roughly 20 minutes. And it’s going to be like 30 to 40 minutes depending on the temperature of the battery in the room and stuff like that to be a full capacity charge. That’s a little bit longer than DJI and Insta360’s batteries, but it’s also a bigger battery. Like factually speaking, it’s more milliamp hours in those batteries, so it’s going to take longer to charge.

Ultimately, having done a ton of battery charging in the last few weeks here, they’re all charged in roughly that same 30 minute time frame to full charge. DJI does tend to be a little bit faster to get there. But again, all in the general ballpark of really fast.

Overheating & Airflow Testing

Speaking of the battery life, one of the things people often ask is, does it overheat? So, I’ve been doing both battery tests as well as overheating. It’s actually pretty warm here, about 80° Fahrenheit, so 30° C roughly. And by and large, it’s meeting those claims. And you’ll notice on the chart, they have two different numbers, without airflow and with airflow.

One of the things to understand about all action cameras, whether it be from DJI, Insta360, or GoPro, is that if you have airflow, it is really darn hard to get them to overheat. It’s pretty rare these days for those cameras, including GoPro’s own Hero 13 Black in the past. But once you remove airflow in a static environment, things can overheat pretty quickly. Here’s my simplified results right there thus far on my overheating test. I’m still doing more of them as the temperatures have really heated up here in the last few days.

New Microphone Array & Audio Samples

Next, something totally different, microphones and audio. So, they’ve added a new microphone. They’ve added a new rear microphone and they’ve changed the microphone positions. So there’s now two in the front and one on the side. And of course the new one in the back.

The two in the front will provide better stereo audio when you’re talking like this. And the one in the back will provide better audio when you’re well, talking like this. All these are used like in the past with wind reduction. So it’s going to dynamically switch between the different microphones to go ahead and produce a theoretically flawless sound.

Okay, here we go. A bit of an audio test. Right now we’re doing about 40-45 km an hour, roughly 25 miles an hour down this hill. I’m facing the front of the camera. So on the front microphone, I’m going to go ahead and twist it around right here about a foot away, 30 centimeters away from the camera, talking to the back of the microphones, and then just turning it back around again to me. Also, bit of a combination low light test. Right now, 4K 50 in wide in that specialized low light mode.

Advanced Audio Controls & USB-C Mic Support

Now, with these new microphones, there’s a whole slate of new audio control options. There’s a new microphone audio control panel with a bunch of options in there. You’ve also the ability now to play back the audio from this onto Bluetooth headphones if you have it. You can also go ahead and play the beeps on this onto Bluetooth headphones if you have it. You can now record the raw audio from all the different sources individually if you want. 32-bit float, 24-bit PCM, and then on top of that, you now have proper USB-C mic support. No more GoPro adapters required here. You can use any generic USB-C microphone adapter.

Well, in theory, any generic one. I’ve had some like hit or miss luck here. I’ll do a separate video on which ones are working for me and not working for me. But even cooler than that is you can just take a USB-C cable and go straight to something like the DJI mic right here that I’m recording this entire video on. Just clip it. You’re done. Like, it’s as simple as that. No additional adapters required. It just supports any USB-C microphone, which this actually is.

Here’s a simple audio test standing in the woods of what the DJI mic sounds like when it’s wired directly into the camera itself. I’ve disabled the camera’s mics and am just using only this microphone right here. You can also use the existing Bluetooth pairing to stuff like this as well. But the reality is DJI isn’t using Bluetooth when they’re connecting to the devices. I’m filming this on the DJI Pocket 4. You’re hearing the audio from the Pocket 4. That’s actually across a proprietary link. It’s not across Bluetooth. That’s why it sounds so good. The Bluetooth side is just kind of blah.

And then here is what Bluetooth audio sounds like from the DJI Mic Mini directly from this to the camera. This is actually entirely powered off. You probably can’t see that, but this thing is not used at all right now. So to solve for that, GoPro has their own wireless mic system. You can see an image of it right here. I don’t have one of those yet. At some point I will. When I do, I will test it and tell you how it works and where it falls short, where it’s great, and all that kind of stuff. That will essentially give you the same sort of experience that you would have on the DJI mics with the DJI action cameras, except in the GoPro ecosystem instead.

Live Metering & USB-C/HDMI External Monitor

Now, there are two kind of decoy features that are sort of just after this that are notable here. They’ve added a new live metering settings option. You can see this on the screen right here. So, you can see your settings in real time or live metering in real time. Not so much settings, but your metering in real time.

You can also, coming up in the next firmware update likely later on in June, be able to connect your camera to a USB-C to HDMI adapter straight up. So, this actually has two different features in it. First one is you can just simply plug this in with any HDMI USB-C adapter into a TV, a monitor, etc. Or if you have a USB-C cable, you can go straight from this to the GoPro Quik app and use your phone as a live wired monitor. You can always use it as a wireless monitor, but there’s obviously plenty of advantages to using wired in a rig of some sort if you wanted there.

Styling Options & Anti-Flicker Detection

Next, speaking of cinematicy sort of things, there’s a new cinematic and styling options or image tuning options. This is actually what is used for the dive mode that I mentioned earlier on. It’s just simply an image styling option, and you can change them automatically on whatever one of your modes that you want to.

Likewise, there’s also new shutter and ISO range options. Basically, allow me to make kind of this bracket layer there if you want in the pro mode. And even kind of cooler than that, there’s a new anti-flicker detection option. So, it’ll automatically detect the flicker of your lights like this light here for example, whether you’re in Europe or in North America or wherever you are in the world, and give you a little warning that pops up that says, “Hey, this isn’t matching the camera settings.” And allow you to adjust that on the fly.

50MP Photo Mode & New Time-Lapse Options

Okay, so we’re rounding towards home here, but there’s some really cool things you don’t want to skip out on here. One, there’s a 50 megapixel photo mode that’s been added. That said, the vast majority of the time, I’m just going to take stills from the 8K footage because it’s already massive in terms of megapixel, and it means I’m shooting at up to 60 frames per second, so it’s way easier to get the exact shot I want. But if you got a relatively still scenario, then go for the photo, I guess.

However, far more interesting than that to me is the new time-lapse mode options. In the past, you had time-lapses either photos or video. So, when you took a time-lapse, it made a video at the end or it had a whole crap ton of photos, like thousands and thousands of photos. Now, you can do both at the same time.

So, you can choose in the time-lapse option to spit out the video like you had in the past for just the easy button, share it on social media in seconds, and you’re done. Or you can also choose to add the photos at the same time in either JPEG or RAW. That’s handy if you’re like, “Oh, this shot actually turned out really, really good. I want all the flexibility of those original images, do processing, whatever I want.” You can do that yourself or you can say, you know what, this time-lapse was garbage. I don’t need any of that stuff. I’m happy with just that little short video and good to go. Also, with time-lapse, you’re now getting that video in 8K as well. Meanwhile, you’re also getting that video in up to 8K if you want, as well as HLG, HDR option, and max bit rate options that you can select in the settings.

GoPro Labs Firmware Settings

In fact, if settings are your jam, if that’s what like gets you excited at night, there is of course still GoPro Labs support for the Mission 1 Pro, adding a silly number of extra settings you can set, including 300 megabit per second support and a gazillion other options that have been there for a number of generations now. It’s like the geek’s toolbench or toolbox, if you will, of GoPro stuff that is still here as well and expanded even further.

Minimum Focusing Distance Test

Also, one of the questions I got quite a bit was around minimum focusing distance. In other words, how far away do you have to hold your camera here? Now, there’s no better way to explain minimum focusing distance than standing in a bush with a ruler. So, I’ve got this set to 60 centimeters right now, which is what GoPro says is their ideal minimum focusing distance.

And I’m just going to simply decrease it down so you can see the difference. So, I’m going to remove 10 cm off right now. There we go. Now we’re at 50 cm. And now we’re at 40 cm. Slowly getting closer to my nose. Now we’re at 30 cm away from my nose. Now we’re at 20 centimeters away from my nose. Now we’re at 10 centimeters away from my nose. And now we are definitely very uncomfortably on my nose.

Obviously, your wingspan is going to dictate how far away you can go. In my case, my wingspan means I can actually go quite a bit further away than this versus a shorter person is going to be a little bit closer than this, but in terms of action stuff, this hasn’t been a problem for me. Obviously, if you’re trying to shoot like flowers or macro stuff up close, right now it’s going to be a problem.

Removed Resolutions & Features

So, with that noted, I want to run through a bunch of things that are removed from the camera or not here or things like that compared to the past. There is no 5.3K or 2.7K resolutions. This is either 1080p, 4K, or 8K, or technically also 1440p and 4×3. That’s basically due to like the entire imaging pipeline here is not optimized for 5.3K. That is a bit of a bummer cuz I’m having to shoot like these really big videos that honestly I don’t often need in 8K. I’m happy to have the 5.3K, but I want more resolution than 4K delivers for taking stills and stuff like that out.

Likewise, they’ve removed 8×7 aspect ratio and you’re back to 4×3 now. I don’t think that really matters in the grand scheme of things. It’s pretty close to what you had in the past.

Older Lens Accessory Compatibility

None of the Hero 13 lenses work on this. So, if you had any of the HB series lenses, like the anamorphic lens, the macro lens, all that kind of stuff, they don’t work. They physically just don’t fit on here. Like, the 1-inch sensor is just too big, like factually, physically speaking, to fit on there anymore. So, those are all gone.

The GoPro mount on the bottom though is still identical to the past. So, you have that little finger mount there. That’s a standard GoPro thing. It’s also magnetic, so you can put it on a magnetic surface. And as well, there’s a tripod mount built in there. It is still by far the best mounting system of any action camera out there, giving you the most flexibility that you want.

Missing Features (NAS Uploading & Onboard Storage)

Now, a couple features that are not on the GoPro that I wish were compared to the competitors, in particular DJI. DJI has NAS uploading support, so I can sync it automatically to my local NAS. I love the GoPro Cloud and syncing up to the GoPro Cloud for like long-term backup stuff, but for like workflow stuff and having it all synced locally, it is just so much faster for my workflow than having to deal with the big files back and forth from the cloud. I really wish GoPro had added that, especially as they’re targeting more of that pro workflow kind of realm.

Likewise, there’s no onboard storage built into this, so you do have to have a micro SD card. Now, I think most of us put a micro SD card in all of our action cameras, but when you forget to put it in the DJI action camera, no big deal. There’s some storage there for the day, so you can still make things work, but if you forget here, you’re out of luck.

New Media Mod, Grip & New ND Filters

Now, because some of the past accessories, like the Hero 13 Media Mod, are not compatible because it’s a physically bigger camera, there is a new media mod coming. That new media mod has a revamped mic system. It has external timecode support and it no longer requires you to take off the entire mounting system to change the batteries. Again, I don’t have that yet. It’s not quite available yet, but once I do, I’ll have a separate video on that. I’m just looking forward to that side alone. It was such a pain in the butt to change the batteries.

Instead, what is available today is a new grip. This essentially gives you well, a grip to go ahead and wrap around the camera. It’s notable there are no electronics in this grip at all. It is purely a mechanical thing that has a lever on the right hand side that can go ahead and basically press that button for you and gives you a couple cold shoe adapters. This has been fine. I’m not really a big grip person. The challenge here for me though is that you can’t use any of the USB-C ports on the grip.

So like I wanted to be able to put for example the receiver and stuff like that of my mic on there and I can’t do that. So I’m just not convinced on what the target audience of this is compared to the media mod. The media mod, like I get it, I just wish there was like some middle ground there. I wish I could just plug something in somehow on the side of the grip, but unfortunately I can’t do that.

Meanwhile, there are new ND filters, an ND filter pack, just like there was for the Hero 13 Black. And just like the Hero 13 Black, they have that new little chip there that automatically tells the camera which ND filter you have on it and optimizes the settings for the best motion blur, etc. Super cool little feature because generally speaking, I find most ND filters for most cameras make it worse because people just don’t know how to use them. Not because like the pro can’t make it work, but because everyone else just sticks it on there and screws up the settings. So, in this case, it makes the settings perfect for you.

Mission 1 Base vs Mission 1 Pro Model Differences

Now, before we wrap things up, you may be wondering, what is the difference between the base unit and the pro unit? And essentially, it’s all about frame rates. Here’s a little chart somewhere on the screen right here that shows the differences right there. But it’s frame rates, frame rates, frame rates, and which modes are supported in OpenGate. That is it. Everything else is 100% identical.

Final Conclusions & Upgrade Recommendations

Which ultimately gets me to my final conclusions. There is no question this is the most capable, most full-featured, most everything under the sun action camera in the market today. Like factually speaking, that is the reality of the situation. From an image quality standpoint, in virtually every scenario, it’s better. I think like low light would be one where it’s kind of a wash in my testing back and forth. But for every other setting, it is really, really good. I’m seeing that across all of my footage.

Speaking of which, every single bit of footage you’ve seen in this review has been shot with final firmware. So, while I’ve been using this camera for a month and a half, almost 2 months, all that previous footage I threw away. And by and large, that firmware has been pretty darn stable. In fact, I’ve only run into one issue on that firmware thus far, which was actually just last night, where the display stopped like showing stuff like you can see right here. Other than that, it’s been flawless. And once I just turned off and on the camera again, it’s been perfectly fine in every other scenario since then. So, I’m thinking that was just a one-off. I haven’t seen it at any other point in the last month and a half, but I figured I’d mention it.

Now, obviously the GoPro costs more than its competitors because, well, it has more features. If you have a GoPro Hero 13 Black, I don’t know if it’s worth the upgrade unless you find something on this list that you really, really want. If you have a GoPro 9, 10, 11, maybe even a 12, that would be a substantial upgrade. Likewise, if you have an Insta360 Ace Pro 2 or a DJI Action 6, unless there was something on that list that you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I really wanted that,” you’re probably not going to notice a huge difference in like day-to-day usage.

Now, I’m going to have a full separate video that’s going to go through all the nuance difference between the three core action cameras available today. The Insta360 Ace Pro 2, the DJI Action 6, and the GoPro Hero 13 Black. So, it can help you figure out which camera is best for you. That said, for the most part, for the vast majority of general action scenarios, they’re all going to feel pretty similar to most people. It’s whether or not one of the features you saw in this review sticks out to you as like, “Yes, I really want that one thing” that might drive you more towards a GoPro. Or the opposite for the handful of things that they might have that GoPro doesn’t.

This article is based on a video from DC Rainmaker, one of our YouTube partners. You can watch the full review on the DC Rainmaker YouTube channel and find more of Ray’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.