It might seem incredible that action cams are relevant at all during a year when smartphones were cited by Olympus, a company that's been making cameras for 84 years, as the main reason for its decision to exit the camera business.īut there is a flipside to the smartphone's all-conquering rise.

These are the best GoPros you can buy right now.

And just like CEO Nick Woodman's original Hero line maturing just as social media took off, the timing couldn't be better. With this new flagship, it's fair to say action cameras have finally grown up. It set the company on a more focused, sensible path that's led directly to the Hero 9 Black. Still, in what is something of a recurring theme in the GoPro story, the fallout from the Karma, and a subsequent stock market battering, was a blessing in disguise. That all came crashing down in the mid-2010s, when GoPro's success went to its head and it overextended itself with launches like the GoPro Karma drone. The original 35mm 'GP Hero' from 2005 (Image credit: GoPro) But that was before social media got us hooked on producing airbrushed daily edits of our awesome lives* (*cleaning timelapses not included), and GoPro rode a monster wave of internet one-upmanship that sold action cameras by themselves. The company's founder and CEO Nick Woodman has admitted that he didn't think GoPro would be anything more than a niche surfing accessory. You had to wind it on manually and there was no video.

Incredibly, the first GoPro in 2005 was a disposable 35mm film camera stuck inside a waterproof case, with a strap for surfers to mount it on their wrists.

Of course, this isn't the first time that GoPros have had to evolve. GoPro Labs lets you unlock new Hero 8 Black features – here's how to try it.And that's a big deal for those of us who are still fond of owning a versatile little waterproof camera in a world with slightly less action than usual. But its new features and the GoPro Labs platform show that it's definitely evolving promisingly in that direction. It's no longer just a pocket, waterproof Instagram Story generator – thanks to these new skills, it has the potential to be your webcam, body cam, dash cam, security cam, anything cam.

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