As many of you have probably been anticipating, GoPro’s Hero 4 is the much awaited update to the already wildly popular GoPro action camera that so many people already coveyt. The current iteration, the GoPro Hero3+ was what many expected could or should be the GoPro Hero4 solved many of the problems that the GoPro Hero3 had, however, it didn’t really improve the overall resolution or framerate of the camera. According to DGISE the new GoPro Hero4 will be released this summer using the already well-known Ambarella SoC that’s already been capable of 4K video encode and decode for quite some time.

However, a lot of people were pretty disappointed with the improvements of the Hero3+ over the Hero3 because it felt like such a long time without any significant improvements. But then, in February we got our answer. GoPro announced that they would be going public as a company and filed for an IPO which ultimately meant that the company would launch the new camera after their IPO in order to ensure a good boost of the shareprice and the company’s value. There’s no doubt that once GoPro releases this camera it will be able to do 4K and will probably do it for about $400 which would make it the cheapest 4K camera, ever, and probably for a long time. This clear technology advantage would likely mean that a lot of people with older GoPros would probably upgrade to the new GoPro and they would also win over a lot of new customers as well, with this new 4K featureset and incredibly reasonable price. Even the cheapest smartphone that can record 4K will cost you $600-$700.

According to the rumor, the new Hero4 will be able to do 13 megapixel stills in addition to the 4K video at 30 FPS, the current holy grail for any camera system hoping to achieve the highest level of quality right now. In addition to that, it is rumored to be capable of 1080P at 120 FPS and 720P at 240 FPS, which means that even if you don’t think you want or need the 4K feature, you can still get some impressive slow motion video capture at 1080P. The camera will also have the ability to capture stills while recording video, which is a great feature for anyone looking to pull stills from a very well shot video.

There is no specific price set for this camera, but I’d expect it to be around $399 with all the bells and whistles and that it would launch shortly after GoPro’s IPO becomes a reality. So, simply watching GoPro’s business should indicate to us when we can see the Hero4. Sure, its risky to do things this way, but I just don’t see them rationally waiting this long to do a Hero4 with 4K video playback and launch it BEFORE their IPO. It just doesn’t make any sense to anyone that knows how well these guys have done for themselves with this camera system. I would also expect to see some new features in the Hero4’s software that will focus on GoPro’s focus on media creation and not just selling hardware to consumes and extreme sports enthusiasts.

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Sony has announced the update to their Alpha A7 full frame mirrorless camera, with the announcement of the Alpha A7s. This is not to be confused with the later released Alpha A7R, which sports an enormous 36.4 megapixel sensor, identical to that of the one in Nikon’s D800, but packed into a body less than half the size of the D800. The original A7 came with a 24 megapixel sensor, while the A7R comes with a 36 megapixel sensor, and now the A7s comes with a 12 megapixel sensor. All of this may seem a bit bizarre and confusing until you realize why the A7S is 1/3 the resolution of the A7R, and that has to do with the fact that the A7s has some of the craziest ISO performance on earth, oh and it supports 4K video at 30 FPS, something only one other photo camera in the world can do. In fact, this may actually be the smallest 4K consumer camera in the world.

The A7s also sports an impressive ISO range of ISO 50 to 409,600 with the standard ISO range for stills ranging from 100 to 102,400 which is still within the range of most professional DSLRs with their expanded ISO ranges. The Expanded range is 50-409,600 and when shooting video you can use ISO 200 to 409,600.

The camera also has a lot of video friendly features and supports 4K video, however, you cannot record the 4K video directly to the Sony or SDXC memory cards within the camera. Sony states that 4K is a ‘Pro-Quality’ feature and as a result requires an optional external 3rd party 4K recorder, which means that Sony isn’t even the company that’s going to sell you what you need to record your own 4K video. Considering that the camera supports All of the fancy Sony Memory Stick standards as well as SDHC and SDXC, there should be no problem recording 4K video directly to a UHS-1 SDXC card, there are even cards being made specifically with very high write speeds for 4K use. I believe that if you have to use the camera’s HDMI output (which does 4K @ 30 FPS) and record that to an external HDMI recorder, this camera has defeated its own purpose of supporting 4K.

That aside, this camera does support NFC and Wi-Fi which means that you can wirelessly stream your images out to your wireless devices incredibly easily, especially if you have a device with NFC which makes pairing effortless. Overall, I think this camera is pretty awesome, but it remains to be seen if the 4K feature is really worth noting considering the fact that it can’t record directly to an SDXC card that’s inside the camera. If they can fix this, then maybe this camera might be worth getting over Panasonic’s GH4.

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