The GoPro Hero 7 Black was a major return to form for the action cam king, making it a tough act to follow. With few glaring omissions on that model, GoPro has avoided making any drastic changes for its Hero 8 Black update, instead boosting its physical design through some new external accessories called ‘Mods’.

That doesn’t mean the Hero 8 Black hasn’t made some improvements in the meantime. It has a long list of hardware and software tweaks that adds up to a significantly better user experience overall. So with the new Hero 8 Black, GoPro took some risks. Some of these risks pay off, while others will make you a bit nervous.

Let’s start with the body. Since the Hero 5, GoPro cameras have been waterproof up to 33 feet without the need of additional housing, but in order to attach it to anything, you needed to put the camera in a plastic frame. The frame provided the two little loops at the bottom, which you’d put a screw through and attach it to any number of bracket-type things. No more! The Hero 8 is designed to be frameless. It has its own built-in loops at the bottom of the camera that folds in and out. This is one of its very convenient features. The caveat is that you do need to tighten the screw down a bit harder than normal or you may get some wiggle with the camera.

The redesign makes the Hero 8 slightly thinner than the naked Hero 7 front to back (28.4mm vs. 33mm), but it’s also slightly wider and taller (66.3mm by 48.6mm vs. 62.3mm by 44.9mm, respectively). It’s smaller than the Hero 7 when it’s in a frame, though, and considering you need the frame to do pretty much anything, the net result is that the Hero 8 is a lot more pocketable. One of the ways it achieved this was by making the lens slightly lower-profile, but the trade-off is that the front lens element is no longer removable. The new front lens element is thicker and made with Gorilla Glass, and GoPro claims that it is twice as impact-resistant.

With the new lens on the Hero 8, GoPro elected to redesign its auto white balance and colour tuning. This is especially evident in skin tones, the reds in the dirt, the blues in the sky, and greens in leaves. Overall, the default GoPro colour has a punchier, more dramatic look. Skin and dirt are both warmed significantly, while skies remain super vibrant. Detail is excellent overall. But at the same time, the contrast is pushed a bit high. Highlights are nearly blown out, while shadows are significantly darker than they were with the Hero 7.

Last year, with the Hero 7, GoPro introduced its new electronic image stabilisation which it called HyperSmooth. GoPro claimed it gave ‘gimbal-like’ stabilisation but compared to an actual gimbal it isn’t that good. Amazingly, HyperSmooth 2.0 in Hero 8 actually is approaching gimbal level.

GoPro’s interval photography feature, TimeWarp, has also been updated with the new stabilisation software to make it look even better in time-lapse clips where the camera is moving. This is an excellent effect if you want to show off an event’s entire sequence within a short period of time without needing a heap of editing. The updated feature has a new auto interval detection that uses an in-built accelerometer to add more frames when there is a lot going on and spread them out during lulls.

The other major physical difference is that there is now just one big door on the side of the camera that covers your battery, microSD card, and USB-C port. The Hero 8 Black also uses a new type of battery. It’s the exact same size and shape as before, and it packs the same amount of power (1,220mAh). Aside from the blue bottom, it isn’t immediately obvious what has changed. The difference is that the new battery allows for a higher discharge rate. That higher discharge rate helps enable HyperSmooth 2.0 in all resolutions and frame rates. The Hero 8 Black battery is, however, backwards compatible with cameras back to the Hero 5 Black. And likewise, batteries from Hero 5 to Hero 7 are compatible with Hero 8 Black, but the user will get a warning that certain features will not be enabled. So, that’s kind of a bummer for those who have collected a bunch of batteries from the last few generations.