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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

I bought my first GoPro for a scuba diving trip in Mexico once. Was super excited, it was my first scuba diving experience too.

As soon as we hit deeper waters the capture button pressed itself down due the pressure and it wouldn’t come back up. That, unfortunately happened in a way that I couldn’t start a capture. Lost the entire thing, despite the camera being perfectly fine after we came back to surface.

Hated them ever since.

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For scuba diving you will want to have a house for the camera regardless of brand. It not only lower the risk of damages, but it is also more explicitly designed for depth without needing to compromising for non-divers.

That said, GoPro is not the best for low light environments, and the battery is a bit temperature sensitive, both which can be an issue when diving.

GoPros (at least the early generations) required a special housing for use in water. My first GoPro was a 2 I believe and I bought it for scuba and it was terrible. Then the newer models came out promising better performance for diving, so I upgraded... and it was terrible as well. Gave up on GoPros after being sucked in twice and not getting the results I was hoping for. It was ok for other things, but anything involving water was not great.

I believe things eventually got sorted out for water use, but I was no longer a customer.

Totally, I had the 4th generation one, and I used their water case enclosing. It was less than 30m deep, and within their safe range.

Hahahah. Do you seriously just take random objects deep underwater and expect them to be designed to withstand that sort of an environment?

Was the GoPro you bought rated up to that depth or something? After a cursory look online, they're only rated down to 10m, which is about what I'd expect.

It was rated 30m, I went down less than that, and I used their enclosing thingy. Yes, I did expect it to work as their marketing team managed to convince me of such.

It wasn't a random object, it was a camera marketed for such environment.

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