Product Review: GoPro Hero 8 vs GoPro Hero 10 | Worth Upgrading? A Runners Perspective

I’ve upgraded from a GoPro Hero 8 to a GoPro Hero 10, lets take a deep dive into the good and the bad of using a GoPro from the perspective of a runner.

How I use a GoPro

So if you’ve been watching my Run Adventurer Channel you’ll know I shoot running videos which I put out on YouTube to the general public and Vimeo for my Patreon subscribers. As such I need to shoot footage at 4K 30. I prefer a cinematic linear / dewarped look and feel so you feel like you are there when you watch the videos.

My main issue is being able to film stable content while I’m running and so I use a head mounted GoPro with stability turned on high (not boost as that crops the footage too much).

My other issue is that I need to film for a long period of time between 1 hour and 12 hours and so I use an external battery pack which allows me to film for extended periods of time without having to stop to change batteries.

GoPro Hero 8

So I’ve been using the GoPro Hero 8 for most of my footage since I bought it which is great because it creates crisp, stable footage out of the box. 

I solved the external charging issue by buying a third party charge door (Ulanzi G8-10) which has a hole in it so the Go Pro can be charged from an external battery while I’m filming.

Note: the GoPro Hero 8 Camera Software is duff and so you have to make sure the GoPro is turned off before connecting it to the external power and that the internal battery is at 70% or less otherwise it ignores the external power and runs on internal until the battery is flat then it just beeps and turns itself off.

Why Upgrade from a Hero 8 to a Hero 10 then?

So why upgrade? Well I have had some issues with the Hero 8 which is why I upgraded in the hope of fixing them, the issues I’ve had include:

Turns off in the Cold

This is the biggest issue and it’s infuriating. Below about 7 degrees C the camera will randomly die as it can’t get enough juice to run the stabilisation and so it crashes, it doesn’t beep so the first you know about it is when you finish your 15 mile run and discover the thing died 3 miles in. You have to remove and reinsert the battery to bring it back to life. I’m assuming this is due to the chip not being powerful enough to run the stabilisation in the cold and as a result I have to swap to an Osmo Action in the winter which doesn’t produce footage that is as stable.

Not Waterproof

As I’m using an external door with a hole in it the GoPro isn’t waterproof and so you are constantly worried about it getting wet. The Hero 9 and now the Hero 10 have the option to buy a passthrough charging door which has a rubber gasket inside to keep it fairly waterproof certainly enough to cope with a little light rain anyway.

Water on the Lens

If you do get a drop of water on the Hero 8’s lens, it has a habit of just sitting there and ruining your footage whereas the Hero 10 has a Hydrophobic coating to help shed the water.

No Auto Levelling

No matter how careful you are the footage never comes out perfectly straight and has to be rotated in edit. The Hero 9 and 10 include auto levelling so your footage is always level.

Low Light Jitters

While I’m not convinced the Hero 10 will really fix this completely, I do have an issue with the GoPro Hero 8 that in low light conditions ie filming in Magic Hour where the stabilisation doesn’t work properly because there isn’t enough light.

Have to take out the SD Card

This one annoyed me, when I got the Hero 8, I could offload the footage by plugging it into my Mac USBC / USBC, then GoPro did a camera software update and that stopped working. I tried using their GoPro Quik software on the Mac but its rubbish and doesn’t work reliably and from the phone is not viable due to the quantity of footage I shoot so instead I just take the SD Card out of the camera every time which requires me to remove the camera from its mount which causes wear and tear breaking the mounting pins over time.

Can’t Sync

I could never get the Hero 8 to sync the content to the cloud due to the shear volume of content. The Hero 10 has faster Wifi.

What the GoPro Hero 10 Fixed

Low Temperature

I’ll have to wait until the depths of winter to be sure but I’ve now used the camera filming for extended periods of time at about 5 degrees C and it didn’t crash like the Hero 8 does.

Waterproof

I’m using the official passthrough door which does appear to be pretty waterproof not for immersion but good enough for my purposes ie filming in the rain.

Water on the Lens

While not perfect you do still get small water drops on the lens I can now film and get some good footage in the rain.

Levelling

Apart from the odd case where it didn’t look completely level, the auto levelling feature seems to work pretty well and will help save time in editing.

What it didn’t fix

Low light Jitters

While its improved, the footage is still less stable in low light conditions

Having to take the SD Card out

Using the phone to pull off all the footage is not a viable workflow for me. While I can get the footage into the now legacy GoPro Quik app on my Mac, the transfer is slow so I’ll be continuing to just take the SD Card out.

Can’t Sync

Due to the size of the files I still can’t upload to the cloud. Right now the camera is sat charged on my desk trying to upload the 4 hours of footage direct from the camera over wifi, it’s being doing that for 2 days and is no where near finished and I need to use the camera so the SD card will be wiped and never get uploaded. The issue is the same trying to do it via the phone or web browser, I don’t have the luxury of leaving my phone to perform the task 24/7 for a week to offload one shoot.

New Issues..

So the GoPro Hero 10 seems to have an overheating issue. While its fine for my application of filming 4k 30 outside for long periods of time, the camera overheats if you do that inside and while it can film at 5.3k 60 or 4k 120 you can only do this for short periods of time before it overheats eg 10-30 minutes. Come on GoPro up your game..