GoPro Hero 13 Black review

GoPro Hero 13 Black now has more lens options than before. All lenses come with a blue circle that helps you align them quickly, and the camera can now auto-detect which lens is mounted and switch to the appropriate settings automatically. It’s pretty seamless, and no, these lenses don’t work with older GoPros. This is one of the most important and user-friendly features GoPro has added. It takes away the headache of switching modes after you switch lenses. The camera automatically switches to the setting you assigned for the said lens mods.

There are a total of four new lenses. First up is the Macro lens, which takes you up close and personal to the action! The Macro lens (Rs. 12,990) is also one of the first-ever GoPro lenses with an adjustable focus ring, and the camera does focus peaking as well. The Macro lens isn’t the Macro you see on Nat Geo’s Instagram, but it’s more for getting up close and personal. It’s an interesting choice of lens for an action camera, but we feel GoPro is going for a more lifestyle approach with this one.

The second on the list is the famed ultrawide lens (Rs. 9,990) which is now wider with a 177° field of view and also supports a 1:1 aspect ratio which is bigger than last year’s 8:7 for cropping images as you wish.

The third one is an Anamorphic lens that brings 21:9 cinematic flair to your shots but we didn’t get to try it because this lens is going to launch in 2025. According to GoPro there’s an in-camera de-squeezing that happens so you can review and edit anamorphic content without intensive post-production workflows.

The fourth lens is actually a pack of 4 ND filters (Rs. 6,990), ranging from 4, 8,16 and 32. These lenses also have the same auto detect feature and it will prompt you to adjust if you’re overexposed or underexposed. It’s a pretty handy feature because you don’t want to fiddle with the settings when you’re looking to grab that sweet action shot or a fleeting moment.

New lenses are great, but I think the new attachments are here to expand the action camera’s capabilities a lot more. The Contacto Magnetic Door and Power Cable Kit (Rs. 7,990) is a magnetic door that can charge your battery without exposing it to the elements. Essentially it’s a USB Type-C port inside the door which plugs into the camera, and the outside pins magnetically attach it to the cable.  You also get cable length options here, and we’re not sure if this does data transfer as well, but we’ll update this review as in when GoPro replies to us.

Speaking of which, there’s a magnetic attachment too, just like the DJI. A new Magnetic Latch (Rs. 2,500) and Ball Joint Mount (Rs. 4,000) have been introduced to take advantage of the GoPro Hero 13 Black’s new magnetic mounting system. The camera has space around the edges of the fingers and the 1/4-20 mount to plonk these two magnetic attachments and switch between them by pinching the release buttons. So now you can attach your GoPro in three different ways.

Internally there hasn’t been any major update within the camera. The sensor and processor are the same but GoPro has managed to squeeze more life out of its hardware this time.

You can now do a Burst Slo-Mo with up to 400 frames per second at 720p video, as well as 5.3K at 120 frames per second and 900p at 360 frames per second video. This might not sound like incredible numbers at first but the 400 frames is all raw data and none of it is done through frame interpolation. It’s important because the frame interpolation creates undesirable artefacts and unnatural movement to your shots and that’s something you won’t see on the GoPro Hero 13 Black. However, the use case for these shots are strictly in brightly lit environments. GoPro always struggled with low light and this one is no different.

Low light shots are better on last year’s DJI Action 4 compared to this year’s GoPro Hero 13 Black. GoPro’s lowlight has a great deal of noise in scenes with shadows and low light. In terms of capture modes, the highest quality is still the 5.2K resolution but now GoPro can do 120 frames on that resolution as well. Additionally, the GoPro can also do Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) HDR video at 10 bit and Rec. 2100 colour space. However, not all resolutions and modes are available with all lenses. GoPro uses in-sensor cropping so you may be locked into 4K or below with most lens mods. You might have to use the GoPro for a long time to understand all its little gifts and quirks.

The best reason to pocket a GoPro Hero 13 Black is the 1:1 aspect ratio which is now bigger than the 8:7 from last year. The 1:1 only works with the 177° Ultra Wide lens but it basically removes the need to capture shots in landscape for YouTube or Portrait for Instagram. You can simply crop into the 1:1 aspect ratio as you like and still get the buttery smooth HyperSmooth stabilisation at 4K 60FPS.

The image quality is still very GoPro-like with natural sharpness and bright highlights. The GoPro has a natural charm about its picture quality. It doesn’t attack shadows and highlights like the DJI and smartphone cameras tend to do. The heating issue has not really been addressed here so if you shoot cars and bikes under the hot sun like our sister magazine Autocar India, consider yourself warned. This year’s GoPro is iterative to the last letter but still a capable shooter nonetheless. According to GoPro the camera is meant to be used with moving air to cool it if you really want to shoot 4K continuously.

Sadly, you can’t use your old batteries with this one. There’s a new redesigned 1900mAh Enduro Battery which is now 10% larger than before which does give you more shooting time.

Little titbits of tech improvements have also been made. For instance, there’s WiFi 6 now for 40% faster transfer speeds. You can pick between audio quality now. You can take a balanced sound with all the birdies chirping in the background or switch to a voice setting that enhances vocal clarity.

For folks who have the need for speed, there’s a GPS which enables performance stickers. Essentially you can track speed, path, terrain, altitude and g-force.

There’s a longer list of attachments and mounts on the GoPro now. The Hero 13 Black remains the best action camera GoPro has ever made which is mostly thanks to a wide variety of interchangeable lenses and clever magnetic mounting capabilities. The point and shoot capabilities of the camera have been improved with auto detection of lenses. This removes all the guesswork and lets you capture the moment stress-free. If you want to shoot videos in low-light, DJI is a better option but if you’re interested in a more natural camera-like quality with official ND filters and LOG flexibility in post, the GoPro is still the best.

The thermals have still not been addressed because the Hero 13 Black has more quality of life changes than an evolution in action cameras. GoPro has gone with the ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach but if you do manage to break your GoPro Hero 13 Black, it now has two years of warranty. One year is provided by Luxury Personified (Official Distributor) and an additional 1-Year warranty is the standard 1-Year International Warranty by GoPro.