GoPro Hero 13 Black review: Still the best, but only just

The GoPro Hero 13 Black is the most high-profile action camera in the world. Does GoPro still deserve to sit right at the premier spot of the action camera market? Perhaps, but the caveats are more substantial than ever and the competition from rivals DJI and Insta360 has never been stronger.

The GoPro Hero 13 Black is hard to beat for shooting during the day. Detail, stabilisation and general versatility are all excellent, while GoPro’s colour tone is more measured and natural than most. This generation also brings a deeper system of lens attachments, called Mods, opening up new styles of shooting.

It falls behind at night and at lower lighting levels in general. And if you were hoping for dramatic new modes, a different sensor or a completely fresh interface, the GoPro Hero 13 Black doesn’t provide them.

As such, this probably isn’t a sensible upgrade for most Hero12 Black owners. But as long as you aren’t planning night shoots, it competes well with the best from DJI and Insta360.

GoPro Hero 13 Black review: What do you get for your money?

The GoPro Hero 13 Black costs £399, and that nets you the battery, charging cable and a basic mount kit. GoPro sells a handful of camera-plus-accessory bundles for various use cases from fishing to pet wear and skateboarding. The sheer wealth of third-party peripherals mean you can spend less by shopping around, although quality will vary. 

Some parts worth considering pre-purchase are the new Mods and neutral density filters. The macro Mod costs £130, the Anamorphic Mod is another £130 and the ultra-wide Lens Mod costs £100. A four-pack of neutral density filters is £70.

How does this stack up against the competition? Insta360’s Ace Pro 2 is a very close rival at £389, and has eye-catching 8K/30 mode, while the DJI Action 5 Pro is a chunk cheaper at £329. The pressure is on from these more aggressive rivals. 

Physically, there isn’t much new here. Hidden in the base of the camera is a new magnetic latching system, which allows quick-release attachment to and detachment of compatible accessories. It does require a £25 GoPro Magnetic Latch Mount accessory, but it lets you avoid having to secure a thumb screw. You just jam the camera down onto the mount plate: handy for triathletes or the patience-deficient. 

There’s a larger 1,900mAh battery inside (vs 1,750mAh in the Hero 12 Black) but, other than this, the GoPro Hero 13 Black is familiar fare.

It’s a blocky little thing measuring 72 x 51 x 34mm and weighing 159g. The lens sits on the front, protected by a removable square glass housing with a colour preview screen to its right. The record button is on the top panel, the power button is on the left side, the battery door is on the right, while two folding finger prongs – designed to break before the camera does – fold out from beneath.

It has two screens, one touch-capable 2.27in unit at the rear, and another non-touch-capable 1.4in screen at the front, both in colour. And, inside, it has a 27-megapixel sensor, which can record up to 5.3K/60, 4K/120 and 2.7K/240 video. One new treat for this year is a five-second 5.3K 120fps “burst” slow-mo, which is very welcome. But otherwise, owners of older GoPros will feel right at home here.

Those who were miffed when the GoPro Hero 12 Black lost its GPS feature will be happy, too as GPS makes a grand return. GoPro excised it for the last generation in favour of longer battery life, which also improves in this generation.

GoPro Hero 13 Black review: What does it do well?

The GoPro Hero 13 Black is a star for shooting any activity with a lot of motion, during the daytime. It has been the series’ staple since its beginning.

As with the GoPro Hero12 Black, this camera has a maximum capture resolution of 5.3k, and this footage looks clean and detailed. It’s not over-sharpened, and the noise reduction engine is tasteful enough to avoid fizzing detail in tightly-knit textures like gravel paths. 

A tendency towards such image quality problems is why people have traditionally preferred GoPro cameras over older-generation Insta360 cameras in the past. GoPro’s basics are sound, and demonstrate good taste.

The company’s colour science is sound, too. There’s a solid sense of realism to the footage straight out of the camera, aside from some test clips exhibiting slightly too-hot greens in grassy shots. The standard mode is designed to provide “ready-to-use” footage, but avoids the oversaturated skies some camera tuners can fall into.

There’s also a new HLG HDR mode to play around with. It stores colour data in a slightly different way, using the BT 2020 colour space instead of BT 709. This is one of the ingredients of the “true” HDR formats that make your TV or iPhone recognise an HDR clip and send the screen supernova bright. As such, it’s ideal for those who want to upload to YouTube in HDR. 

This is distinct from the standard HDR mode we already had in older GoPro cameras, and still have in the Hero 13 Black. That is a dual-exposure capture mode designed to balance out exposures where there are lots of very dark and very bright areas in a scene. Footage shot in this regular HDR mode is still stored as SDR clips, it’s just a technique to get around the limited native dynamic range of the camera sensor hardware.

This generation also marks GoPro’s Mods system finally becoming something more substantial. GoPro announced Mods in 2019 with the Hero 8 Black, but the company didn’t develop the system much beyond that. This new generation of “HB Series” accessories brings more lenses: a macro and a widescreen anamorphic lens (out in 2025), as well as a new version of the super-wide Max mod. And they’re now smart accessories, too, meaning the camera recognises them when they’re attached and can switch modes automatically.

The macro is the most interesting of the new Mods I had in to test, not least because it has its own focus ring. While it won’t let you get super-close to subjects, its 11-75cm focus range lets you capture shots with a near-field subject, with a slightly out-of-focus background. It is not a look most other action cameras can achieve.

You can’t really tell what’s in focus from a glance at the rear screen, so GoPro offers focus peaking in a colour of your choice to help out. It could be far more prominent, though. The focus peaking highlight lines are thin.

Another nice touch is that when adding the neutral density filters – typically used to introduce motion blur to daylight footage – the camera will assess the conditions and recommend which filter you use. If it’s very bright and you’ve attached a very mild ND filter, it will recommend you move to a stronger one and vice versa.

You might also want to get hold of the Max Mod for its improved stabilisation. The GoPro Hero 13 Black’s HyperSmooth stabilisation is great with the default lens, bringing a near-eerie calm to the most frantic of movement. But you can only use Horizon Levelling in the highly cropped Linear view and when using the wider Digital Lens views it pays to be a little conscious of lateral movement. A Max Mod will get you closer to the undefeatable stabilisation of a 360-degree camera.

Some other aspects deserve a nod too. While the GoPro Hero 13 Black’s sensor is not new, its 8:7 aspect ratio remains highly versatile, allowing you to make widescreen and portrait views of the same clip without extreme degradation or cropping.

Battery life is better this time around, too. It’s rated at 2hrs 30mins of 1080p/30 capture, or 1hr 30mins at 5.3K/30. Tested using what might be the most desirable, 5.3K/60, half an hour of footage took 39% off the charge level, suggesting full charge capture time of comfortably longer than an hour. 

After such longer sessions, the GoPro Hero 13 Black ends up quite warm, but not alarmingly so and I am yet to see it overheat. However, I was testing the camera during a British winter. The little thing was not having to compete with remotely high ambient temperatures, and the heat does take a while to dissipate as there’s no active cooling here.

GoPro does claim to have worked on this area quite substantially, though. It says max capture durations have increased by 38% to a whopping 58% in the GoPro Hero 13 Black in the most taxing modes, compared to the Hero 12 Black.

GoPro Hero 13 Black review: What could it do better?

While battery life is improved, many longer-term GoPro fans may be left head-in-hands at the decision to alter the battery connector. If you’re a long-term GoPro user, you’ll be disappointed to know you won’t be able to use older GoPro batteries with this camera. 

Charging speed still sucks, too. It taps out at 10W, and a full charge takes upwards of two hours. The DJI Action 5 Pro peaks at 26W, which is much better. 

GoPro is also beginning to fall behind in other important ways, too. The camera’s low-light image quality isn’t as good as that of the Super Night mode DJI offers. We’re still in the action camera doldrums here.

The effect of this lower-light mediocrity doesn’t only impact low-light shooting. Its effect is notable even when shooting under a tree canopy, or indoors, where the GoPro Hero 13 Black image starts to become affected by noticeable dancing/fizzing pixel noise earlier than the DJI Action 5 Pro.

That said, in isolation, video still appears clear and fairly sharp with at least moderate light. GoPro is also quite conservative in its use of HDR. The Hero 13 Black has standard and HDR modes, the latter seeing a halving of maximum frame rate, a side effect of the dual-exposure capture technique it uses, where two exposures for each frame are captured on-the-fly. 

This is a real HDR technique, just not “movie HDR”, but even with HDR switched on the effect is less marked than that of the DJI Action 5 Pro’s standard shooting. Blown highlights are fairly common still.

It’s likely a deliberate choice — more aggressive dynamic range enhancement tends to reduce contrast and make the image appear flatter. Good contrast and colour are key Hero 13 Black strengths.

GoPro is unlikely to offer anything better fresh out of the camera until we get a sensor upgrade. The Hero 13 Black uses the Sony IMX 677L sensor, which has the fast read-out modes an action camera needs, but not the pixel binning-friendly Quad Bayer array structure some rivals have — this can significantly help out in low light.

GoPro has also admitted defeat in another key area, editing beyond a fairly simple mobile app. The company used to offer a desktop video editor. This has been discontinued, and all we’re left with is the Quik mobile app.

Its main aim is to let you input your clips and have Quik quickly process them and spit out postable/shareable results. It scans through your videos to look for points of interest, like changes of scene or people. It works. It’s breezy, but its prescriptive approach won’t be for everyone. 

Want to get more hands-on? You can, but it does feel as though you have to prise Quik’s hands off your footage first. And the app isn’t half keen to get you subscribed to GoPro’s £4.99/mth membership to unlock the full feature set. It’s required for certain music tracks, filters and themes, and always seems to apply one of these restricted elements as standard.

When you’ve just spent hundreds on one of these cameras, the upsell can be a bit of a turn-off. If you want to get deeper on a desktop or laptop, you’ll have to source your own software. Such packages can cost hundreds, although Mac users can use iMovie and there’s a free version of the excellent DaVinci Resolve across platforms.

Another area for improvement is the software on the camera itself. It’s largely the same it has been for years and relies on you creating your own presets to minimise messing around. However, it could — and probably should — feel more responsive and finger-friendly by now. Saving clips and starting the camera up takes longer than on the DJI Action 5 Pro, too. 

Some other older gripes remain too. Just like the previous generations, the front screen could be larger. And the way the glow of the IPS panels is so obvious as soon as you turn the Hero 13 Black on is not consistent with the camera’s status as a piece of consumer tech royalty.

GoPro Hero 13 Black review: Should you buy one?

Despite the niggles, there is no denying the GoPro Hero 13 Black remains a great action camera, one at its full force when shooting in the middle of the day, recording as rough an activity as you like.

GoPro’s renewed efforts to make Mods a more substantial part of the picture are a positive move – especially if the company continues to develop further accessories for the system in future. The addition of the HLG HDR recording mode is more significant than you probably realise and the re-introduction of GPS will be welcomed by those who use it. The high resolution and 8:7 sensor, meanwhile, continue to keep the Hero 13 Black in front of its rivals for versatility.

In certain areas, the gap between its rivals and the GoPro Hero 13 Black is beginning to look a little narrow and, in some respects, rivals have taken a step forward. The DJI Action 5 Pro in particular, is a better camera in low light (although we’re not big fans of its UI). And I’d love to see a revamp of the Quik software, too.

But there is just enough here to keep the GoPro Hero 13 Black in front. Taken in the round, the Hero 13 Black remains the best action camera in the business – it’s not a huge step forward over its predecessor but it’s solid and produces the goods.