Goodbye GoPro, Hello DJI
I started my action camera journey way back in 2014 with a GoPro Hero3+ using which I documented my ride to Marsimik La in Ladakh on my Royal Enfield Thunderbird. Over the years I upgraded to newer versions. I got the Hero 5, Hero 7 Black and then the Hero Max 360 camera. My GoPros have been great and they helped me capture some really lovely moments. Just one problem. Each and every one of them has been predictably unreliable. They hang or freeze at regular intervals. The only solution is to stop my motorcycle, pull out the battery, insert it back in, resume recording and start riding again. As you can imagine, this is absolutely irritating and ruins the entire experience of riding a motorcycle. Not only have I missed capturing moments that I wanted to, but I also found myself constantly looking at the GoPro remote strapped around my wrist to check if the camera was still connected to it. If it had hung or frozen the remote would tell me that it was searching for a camera to connect to.
To give you an example, on my recent Kyrgyzstan ride, my GoPro Max started to consistently hang a few moments after I stopped recording using the QuickCapture feature. This is where you press the record button when the GoPro is switched off. The camera starts up and starts recording. When you press the record button again the camera stops recording and shuts down. This saves battery life since you don’t always need to keep the camera on standby. To solve this problem, I kept the GoPro on standby all day. It did hang but not as frequently as when I was using the QuickCapture feature. But this meant I had to keep changing my battery every hour or so. So I needed to charge the spare batteries using a power bank throughout the day. I did this for my recent Kashmir ride as well.
A search on YouTube led me to believe that several other GoPro owners faced similar problems with their cameras. The standard solution was to remove the battery and insert it back again. I reached a point where I couldn’t deal with this crap any longer. So when I chose to upgrade my action camera to something newer I did what several GoPro owners have done and bought a DJI Osmo Action camera. From what I hear it works all the time. I really don’t care about the size of the image sensor, frame rate and all the bells and whistles. I just want to enjoy my ride and not bother to constantly check whether my action camera has committed suicide or not.
