GoPro - HERO7 Black

It's simple to me. GoPro Hero cameras are a huge PITA to use. They're horribly unreliable and nowadays DJI/Insta look just as good. It's been like this since at least Hero 10. They have done nothing to fix the Hero line and continue to push out a new model every year. It's corporate greed and it's killing the company. I've spent a lot of money on GoPro gear only to be burned by them over and over again. I go out of my way to recommend against GoPro any time some asks. I will give credit where it's due though. The MAX 360 has been a great camera for me. I don't have any of the issues that are so abundant on Hero cameras. It's the only GoPro product I've had a good experience with but I still can't recommend it because of the culture at GoPro. I know if anything comes up that requires them to lift a finger to fix, it will remain broken forever while they work on the next yearly model release.

I've had * Hero 3 White * Hero 4 Silver * Hero 7 Black * Max (1) * Hero 12 Black and I still have all but the 3 white. The 3 white was the only 'bad' one I think, one where the camera really didn't live up to the hype for me and hence I upgraded quite quickly. As for my favourite? In the context of when they came out the 7 felt the most incredible, it really was a big jump with the stabilisation. But I probably shot most of my coolest footage on either the 4 Silver or the Max, just because of the time in my life I was using them and the novelty of 360 footage at the time.

Get whichever Go Pro is in your price range. Anything Hero 7 and above will have hypersmooth and as long as you’re not running it at max resolution and fps it shouldn’t overheat, especially with a fan or AC on in the car. 30 fps would be my recommendation, and most should be able to handle that at 4K just fine.

A GoPro 7 or 8 then. I don't recommend less know action cameras brands like Akaso, not terrible but not great either. Sound quality is really bad and the image stabilization performance is inferior compared to the GoPro or the DJI Action cameras.

For me GoPro always had the best mic/audio balance. insta always sounded baseless and sucked at eliminating wind noise as well

Image stabilization started on GoPro Hero 7. And I’m still using it to this day.

Literally every post now seems to mention low light. I've never had an issue with my GoPros and I've owned every GoPro Black since the 4. Sounds like your sports don't really need low light either, so not sure what the hesitation is. I own a few DJI products as well (drone, mic mini, Osmo mobile) but I'd get a GoPro over the DJI camera for sure.

Reliability, price to performance proposition. At first when I got the Hero 7 Black, I thought the same. Great image, great stabilization, set your expectations correctly and it will do the job it was designed for. . .and then the over heating, cpuffy batteries, app connectivity problems, features missing from previous iterations, glitchy cameras turning off randomly, not recording or saving the file, freezing, very expensive and inferior two 35

7 was a big improvement for sure and the last to work with the gimbal. Big downfall was that it overheated with ease.