I took the Hero 12 Black on a recent ski trip and was really impressed with where the technology is at and how far Go Pros have come since I used one on a snow trip many years ago. The images and recordings come out much clearer and the link to the Quik app makes movie-making on your iPhone very simple. 

I’m not the person who used our previous GoPros the most in my family, but this version cleverly solved most of the reasons why I wasn’t picking it up and using it as much as everyone else: 

Issues

Everything is very easy to set up from scratch and it’s simple to download the Quik app on an iphone and connect everything.

The camera itself attaches simply to the ski helmet with GoPro attachments. It was a simple system of one screw on and off to the bracket. 

There is no wobbling or shaking visible on the footage, it’s very stable, even when skiing over moguls or at speed. This was a deal breaker for me as a huge improvement from a very early model I used.. 

The video quality is excellent, the clarity really is incredible, you’re able to choose between various video resolutions 4K down to 2.7K.

There are different wide different lenses to choose from, which is convenient so I could decide what kind of footage I was going to take ahead of time. It was capturing 156 degrees, so when you watch the video back, it’s like you were actually there, including the definition of shadows and lumps reflecting off the snow.

When the camera was attached to my helmet, the beeps indicating on and off were much simpler for me to understand (I know – I’m one of those people) so I didn’t have get my ski buddies to physically look at the camera to see if the light was on which gets annoying later when you’re editing the footage to have a big close up face greet every video you make. That meant a one press button which was easy on and easy to switch off myself so it made the trip better and me self-sufficient to capture solo ski footage without taking off my helmet each time to check it myself. 

My epic personal fail was not fully charging the battery so I had days where I wasn’t filming because I hadn’t charged my battery properly. The GoPro has good battery life (1.5 hours at 5.3K30 and over 2.5 hours at 1080p30²) but I just got too busy at dinner then fell asleep and just forgot about it.

The Quik app was simple for downloading footage and creating a video from my footage was fairly straightforward until my daughter got hold of the app and wiped my whole movie and footage I’d been making, then the SD card was so tiny we totally lost it while we figured out what to do over the course of a few days! So beware to keep it away from little hands and eyes and if you pull the SD card out, it’s extremely small so keep it safe. 

My son also used the GoPro for spearfishing so created his own account on the Quik app so it’s great for families where everyone is grabbing the camera and doing active stuff for whatever they’re into. You can set up separate account names on the Quik app so you don’t have to fight over it so it’s a good family-use camera .