Anyway: They seem to have a good product and they definitely have been great at creating/expanding a new and distinct niche for mobile photography -- one not easily serviced by iPhones and other mobile devices.
So: Congrats!
I fly gliders recreationally. Last fall one of the guys in the club called me up and asked if I'd lost my GoPro. I hadn't, but from his description, it was probably the camera of a guy I flew a two-seater with in a competition a year earlier.
Turns out that the camera had been returned by a hiker who found it while hiking on a mountain, approximately 10 kilometers from the airfield. Looking at the last footage in the camera, you could see three guys using a suction cup holder to attach the camera on the outside body of the glider. The video continued as the glider launched, and for approximately ten minutes of flight. Then, the camera detatched from the airplane. As it went tumbling down, there were a couple of frames where the glider was captured from below, rapidly disappearing into the sky.
The camera landed on the mountain, where it remained through the winter. A year later, a guy hiking there found it and returned it, in working order, to the glider club.
Also, are things like Gear Pro and other knock-offs worth anything?
http://www.helipal.com/tarot-t-2d-brushless-gimbal-for-gopro...
It's only 2D whereas the EasyGimbal is 3D but I don't think pan stabilization is much useful, except maybe when filming with the camera in hand. When attached to something (a bike, a motorbike, etc.) 2D stab is more than enough.
Now, if you start doing dive rolls on your trail runs the postprocessing may not be enough, but it's been plenty for my bicycling & dirtbiking.
I've never heard of the Gear Pro. Some of the Go Pro alternative are pretty decent, though. The Garmin Vibe has some nice features, but the form factor might not be great for running (no chest mount). Take a look at [2] for some things to think about (read the comments, too)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_iU8rRGBQE
[2] http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2013/12/garmin-depth-review.html
One way to correct the jello effect is to add ND filters before the lens to reduce the amount of light and therefore slow the shutter (since you can't otherwise control the aperture). There are filter holders that can be screwed on top of the box, or attached directly to the lens when the GoPro isn't in its box.
The other way is to re-stablilize in post-processing; results can be good to very good depending on the source footage. Heavy shaking and big jello can't really be corrected, but slow shake can be made to disappear completely.
This was shot with a Tarot gimbal attached to a bike, and no software stabilization: http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-5460407.html
This was also shot with a gimbal but (re-)stabilized in post: http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-5317121.html
both with a GoPro 3 Black Ed.
Googling yields some advice on how to correct the distortion, but nobody seems to provide exact settings. I wonder how much a demand is there for a one-click rectification app for any fisheye.
There are loads of other "action cameras" and they're all quite good. I have a Drift Innovation and am quite happy with it.
On the other hand, GoPro cameras have a reputation for usability in some very extreme situations, use cases outside of the smartphone story (if you are going to mount a device on your helmet or elsewhere, you better hope that it can withstand the elements and a crash or two
Mobile phones are only going to start taking bigger bites out of the market. And sure we may not mount our phones on submarines or airplane wings like we could a GoPro but apart from the extreme cases, our phones will be much more convenient than another piece of hardware right?
I think that there are a ton of use cases in markets they haven't broken into, or among more casual users. If every urban biker in the western world bought one, that's a $BN company right there.
As they get cheaper/better there are things like dashboard cams that you wouldn't use your phone for, so I think they have plenty of market left to grow into.
You mention "every urban biker in the western world" but unless GoPro figures out someway to make it necessary for every biker in the western world to have a camera attached to their bike how on earth is this a realistic goal to shoot for? That is like saying Redbull is shooting to get their product into the hands of every athlete...it's a silly assumption.
Any city cyclist will tell you about all the close calls and accidents they've had, so it's just a matter of making a camera that's rugged and cheap enough to meet the demand. GoPro has rugged down, now they just need to come down in price and maybe up in usability.
I think it's different from the Red Bull example because red bull doesn't really offer anything that tons of cheap competitors don't already offer, and with taste being what it is there's no 'default' drink to capture the whole market.
If gopro just became 'the dash-cam' company, and any time you bought a new bike or car it was a $50 add-on at the register, I think they'd clean house.
Of course we're a ways from a stabilized HD camera being an impulse buy, but they're probably the best positioned company to get there. Then they just have to fight commoditization, which is a nice problem to have.
Perhaps this is different in the US, but in the UK people were definitely putting lights on their bikes way before then, because if you didn't you were liable to get stopped by the police. Having a light on your bike in the UK has been the law for at least 30 years.
See: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19284/it-must-have-...
GoPro has a similar mission as Redbull I think, therefore they would be wise to follow the lead Redbull has already proven successful.
Capturing stuff like this is worth it.
A company like Garmin has made an art of growing revenues in markets that are supposed to be eaten by mobile phones. For example, their fitness division (which is basically GPS Cycling Computers and Watches) made $83 million in Q2 2013[3]. Everything Garmin bike computers do you can get an iPhone app to do instead. But people (including me) buy them because they are SO MUCH BETTER than using a phone.
Incidentally, Garmin introduced their GoPro competitor at the end of 2013.
Also worth noting there is no reason GoPro has to stay limited to cameras.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike,_Inc.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_boom_of_the_1970s
[3] http://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2013/10/30/garm...
Putting you mobile phone in some hardened case and using it as a camera would be OK, but you might want to keep your camera running while you use your phone for other purposes (GPS, actually calling someone, listen to music...), and you wouldn't want to lose your phone in the middle of a mountain.
Yes, the average consumer is only going to buy one every few years, but there are business that will buy hundreds or thousands.
I think there are other places they could move the business also. They could do other kinds of sensors, heads up displays, lots of things that aren't necessarily cameras.
Certainly! We're talking about people who are very interested in expensive hobbies (like skiing, snowboarding, motorbiking), these people are very used to spending a lot of money on their hobby. Combine that with the innate human desire to want to record/photo/share our lives, and the market for "allowing people to record their expensive hobbies" is very lucrative.
It was shipped to my house a few days after launch, as I had pre-ordered, but the camera just does not last beyond half an hour when recording 720p@120fps. This seems a bit... silly, but I was willing to chalk it up to launch day jitters. Nothing was fixed as time went on.
I have emailed support regularly, to the tune of once per week for the month and have received zero response. I wanted to just ask about why my battery dies so quickly and what would they suggest.
Nothing.
For a company with such a great product, they sure make a champion of their product and once-happy customer feel worthless.
Sorry for getting off track, it just bothers me still.
Long story short all the footage from my vacation were unusable as many of the videos and pictures were corrupted/distorted which was annoying. Tried customer support but weren't able to fix the issue so I ended up returning it.
It seems less likely that phones will be able to supercede GoPro in the same way, since you'd never want to subject such an important device to the physical situations that you would a GoPro.
The lens issue is also non-trivial. For a general purpose camera (i.e. smartphone), you wouldn't want a wide angle lens like you would for PoV video, and making a smartphone's camera lens interchangeable for a small segment of its customers probably isn't happening broadly if ever.