Of course, once you've made you video, you'll want to share it with all and sundry. And that typically means shunting it up to cloud, another time consuming process thanks to the quality and size of the video kicked out by the Hero3.
It's not GoPro's fault, of course. But in this era of instant gratification, the time it takes to get video off a Hero3, edit it and then upload it to the cloud, especially compared with the ease and speed of sharing still images, will be a shock for video novices.
Sound and battery blues
Another tricky issue is sound quality. It's the nature of the beast that wind noise will be an issue for a sport and action biased camera. But the sound quality the standard camera captures, for instance, inside a car is car is disappointing.
The bottom line is that if you want the sound to match the immense image quality, you'll need to add some specialised microphones to the shopping list. In some scenarios, notably when using it with cars, it's best to treat the GoPro Hero3 as a video-only device. If you want sound, you'll need additional kit.
Then there's the whole battery life thing. Like previous GoPro's the Hero3 has a swappable battery. You'll quickly realise that's crucial, because the Hero3 chews through its charge pretty fast, especially with Wi-Fi enabled.
It's certainly not a switch-on and forget device. Running out of battery at a key moment is a constant worry. Of course, storage space isn't infinite, so even if the battery life was all-day, when you're generating a gigabyte of data every five minutes, you can't just leave the thing running.
Those niggles aside, the main thing GoPro newbies will experience is a sudden desire to take it everywhere, strap it to anything and record everything in glorious, pin-sharp HD. It's definitely one of those life-changing devices. Once you've gone GoPro, you won't want to go back.
