Below are 34 photos I’ve taken with the GoPro HERO4 Silver, with the camera settings listed under each one.
GoPros are best known for video, but they’re also capable stills cameras. The sensor is small, you don’t get much manual control, and the wide-angle lens doesn’t suit every scene. But you can get shots with one that would be hard, or impossible, with a normal camera.
One thing worth watching as you scroll: 22 of the 34 shots below are ISO 100 at a fast shutter speed. That’s bright daylight, and it’s where this camera does its best work. The six at ISO 376 and higher are the indoor and low-light ones, and that’s where a sensor this small starts to show its grain.
The HERO4 Silver has a small 1/2.3-inch sensor that produces up to 12MP images at 4000 x 3000 pixels. It was also the first GoPro with a built-in touchscreen, and that live view makes it much easier to compose the shot. And it comes with a waterproof housing as standard, so you can put them in places that most cameras can’t go.
The settings for each picture are included in the caption below it, although you only have fairly limited control over the exposure settings. The aperture is fixed at f/2.8, so the camera controls the exposure by adjusting the ISO and shutter speed. The rest is mostly automatic exposure, although you can apply exposure compensation from -2.0 stops to +2.0 stops. You can also put a ceiling on the ISO. Protune’s ISO Limit gives you 100, 200, 400 or 800, and it defaults to 800. It’s a cap rather than a minimum-and-maximum pair; that pair arrived with later models. Starting with the HERO5 Black, some GoPros can shoot RAW. But that’s not an option with the HERO4 Silver–only JPGs.
A few of the shots below ran longer than a second. Those are Night Photo mode, where you set the shutter speed yourself: auto, which goes up to 2 seconds, or a fixed 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 seconds.
The HERO5 Black that replaced it has the same kind of sensor. Despite a few tweaks in the processing engine, its photo quality is very similar (here are some sample photos from the HERO5 Black). It does, however, have quite a lot more control over the exposure settings through its Protune features, so if you’re after more control over the exposure, you’ll be better off looking at one of the newer Black models.
You can click on each image to open a higher resolution version.
Wrap up: Taking photos with a GoPro HERO4 Silver
The HERO4 Silver is long discontinued now, but if you’ve picked one up used or inherited one from a friend, it’s still a capable little stills camera. If you’re weighing it against what GoPro sells today, I’ve put together the same kind of gallery for the HERO13 Black and the HERO12 Black.
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The GoPro Hero 4 takes pictures at 12MP. It is hard to tell from these scaled down images what the image actually looks like. I am trying to determine if the image quality is any better than my $40 action cam. I’ll search the web for better examples but maybe you could post 1 image at full res?