�鶹��

Pros: - Premium build quality - Compact and portable design - Simple interface with only three shooting modes - Quik app works well for stabilizing the footage - App supports H.264 and H.265 mp4 encoding - Good daylight video/image quality - Respectable underwater performance Cons: - No optical or digital stabilization in the camera - Non-removable battery - Lack of manual exposure or white balance control - No exposure compensation - Lengthy post-processing workflow - The mode button feels stiff The GoPro Hero 4K has a premium build and is smaller than expected around the size of half a credit card. It feels solid and has some weight to it. I like it. Before use, the camera needs to be updated to the latest firmware. Make sure you connect the camera to a stable USB power supply before doing this. My Hero 4K came with only 30% battery charge, and updating firmware at this charge level without a stable external power source can harm your camera. The updates went smoothly with the Quik app. The app allowed me to do everything I needed to do as a guest without registration or subscription. This is great. The camera does not have a removable battery, probably to save real estate, and this is another consideration before buying this camera. The camera needs at least a V30 SD card to record and will give you an error message if your SD card is not fast enough. The camera has a very simple interface and only offers three modes of operation: 4K 30fps, 2.7K 60fps (slow motion), and 12MP still photos. Exposure is automatic. There is no manual exposure mode. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, or colour temperature cannot be adjusted. 1080p shooting is possible by selecting the “power save” mode. The camera lens has a very wide shooting angle, almost 180 degrees. However, it is unfortunate that the lens does not have optical stabilization. I think this is a big miss and I don’t like it. Furthermore, the simple camera design also does not feature any digital stabilization. Missing any image stabilization does appear quite disappointing for an action camera. I think they intentionally did it this way to save device power and therefore prolong recording time with the small built-in battery. Fortunately, GoPro made it up by providing the Quik app to stabilize the footage during post-processing. The stabilization is actually quite good and smooth with the app and I am impressed. However, it takes more time and steps to download the footage to the phone and then perform stabilization. It was surprising that the downloading and stabilization process was quite fast. However, the exporting of the final stabilized footage took a long time, which was not surprising for my 5-year-old phone. It took over 15 minutes to export a 90-second 4K clip. One can transfer the stabilized mp4 file to Windows to perform further editing. The exported mp4 is stored under movies/GoPro-export on the phone. This is a lengthy post-processing workflow and I was not impressed. There must be an easier way to do everything on Windows without going back and forth on the phone. I finally found a free Windows software that can perform image stabilization based on gyro data. This means that I can do everything on Windows without needing to use the Quik phone app. I just needed to download the original mp4 footage from the camera directly to my Windows computer via a USB cable. Recorded videos are stored in the Hero/DCIM/100GOPRO folder. Then I can perform the digital stabilization and video editing all on Windows. After setting up this new workflow, I am a happy camper and no longer need to be tied to the phone app. This should speed up the post-processing significantly. The camera’s video quality in daylight is good and sharp, but it is not a low-light camera and therefore image quality may be compromised when shooting indoors. The camera runs warm but not hot, thanks to the full-front heat sink. In conclusion, this is a really compact and solid outdoor camera with respectable underwater performance. However, the lack of built-in image stabilization makes the post-processing workflow longer. If you are willing to trade post-processing time and complexity for compactness and battery life, this is the camera for you. I have to say I really like how compact and portable the camera is and may just accept the longer post-processing time as I don’t shoot long clips, so it should be fine with me.