Date: 26th February 2010

GoPro HD Helmet Hero

I have had my eye on a helmet cam for a while now and have read rave reviews on the original GoPro Helmet Hero. I was looking at picking one of these up and they are available for around £140 online.

However with a product managers good sense of timing GoPro went ahead and launched the HD version of their nifty little cam although it comes with a significant price hike and I have been umming and aahing since Christmas whether to get one.

The DOMTB movie shoot prompted me to finally take the plunge plus of course my ill-gotten gains that arrived during Bankers Bonus Season (that’s the day job) and I ordered the GoPro HD Helmet Hero from dogcamsports at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon and was amazed to see it was delivered at 11am the following day: great service!

After opening the packaging I eagerly examined the contents.

Included in the purchase price are:

- Camera and waterproof case in a superb display box
- A choice of back panels for the case (more on this below)
- Grab bag of mounts and accessories
- Miners lamp mount
- Vented helmet mount
- Choice of leads to hook up to the PC, TV or HDTV
- Rechargeable Lithium ion battery


I had also ordered an 8GB card for £20 and the ‘chesty’ harness for what I feel is an overpriced £40. Dogcamsports also offered a free 4GB card too which came in the box.

So what are the advantages of this over the standard GoPro Helmet hero?

You get a choice of five different HD Video resolution modes and each one takes up a slightly different amount of space on the memory card:

- 1080p = 1920x1080 pixels (16:9), 30 fps (12min/GB)
- 960p = 1280x960 pixels (4:3), 30 fps (14min/GB)
- 720p = 1280x720 pixels (16:9), 60 fps (11min/GB)
- 720p = 1280x720 pixels (16:9), 30 fps (16min/GB)
- WVGA = 848x480 pixels (16:9), 60 fps (16min/GB)

These settings are displayed on the rear of the camera and it's an easy process to change these out on the trail.

You can also shoot HD quality still pictures at a 5 megapixel resolution. There's even a setting to capture stills as a single shot or to take a photo every 2, 5, 10, 30 or 60 secs. Finally there's a 3 photo burst and a self-timer setting.

Which brings me to the memory card. The original camera limited you to a 2GB card. With the HD version you can have up to a 32GB SDHC card inserted to give almost 9 hours of filming capacity at 30fps.

So what about battery life? Again, the original version relied on 2 x AAA batteries and according to all reports was very heavy on batteries. The purchase of shares in Duracell was recommended.

For the HD version you get a Rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery with a built in battery warmer to keep you shooting in those sub-zero temps.

Another issue with the original was the poor sound quality. Because the case is fully waterproof there was no aperture for sound. Users had taken to drilling holes the case to improve the sound.

The GoPro HD has two panels for the protective case, one fully waterproof and the other with plenty of space to let the sound in and it now picks up the sound well. An amusing warning on the back advises which panel to use depending on whether you are travelling at below or above 100mph (amusing for me who is using it on a bicycle)

So all in all an exciting purchase for me and I'm looking forward to experimneting with the variuous settings over the next few weeks as well as shooting some super slow-mo 60fps footage.