Go Pro HD Hero 3 Low Light Night Footage

I have now had the Go Pro HD Hero 3 for a few days and have done extensive testing with it:

All very impressive and I will be doing a full review very soon. However, one thing I wanted to check was the low light performance of the Go Pro HD Hero 3.

The HD Hero 2 was pretty good and I got some very usable footage from it but how would this latest model from Go Pro perform in comparison? Not bad as it seems. Yesterday, I took a lot of footage in Weymouth at dusk where the light was still visible. But all the street lights were on, as were the lights at the local mini fun-fair.

There is not really much point shooting in complete darkness because:

• I don't generally tend to shoot at night with no lights and
• Even my 5D Mark II and Sony PMW EX1 wouldn't do that well in very dark conditions.

Go Pro ​Low Light Footage Video

Note: The clip below on YouTube shows how the Go Pro HD Hero 3 did in low light conditions. However, please bear in mind that YouTube's compression/cooking/fiddling when uploading footage, doesn’t really do this clip justice.

The original is absolutely amazing for a camera this small.

Plus you can see some flickering in from the street lights. That is because I was shooting in NTSC mode and the street lights resonate at 50hz in the UK. I should shoot in PAL at 25, 50 or 100fps to eliminate this. It is hardly noticeable in the original footage.

This is straight out of camera and best watched at 1080...then be sure to check out our full Go Pro HD Hero 3 Black Edition Review.