Today I bought a GoPro Hero 5 Black which I've been after for weeks, involving a lot of trawling around Mercadolibre.

I finally found one on Facebook Marketplace, with one careful owner. It had hardly been used by the young owner who's parents had bought it for her, but she found it too complicated to use, apparently.

And yes, it is rather sophisticated, with WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and you can control it with a phone app and voice commands.

Best of all is that it shoots in 4K and also has a 12 Megapixel camera, so I'm looking forward to my first outing on the bike to put it to the test.

Nothing like a new toy to play with!

I had previously bought a cheap copycat action cam at Tesco for £30 but frankly it didn't come anywhere near the real thing.

Must be one of those gadgets that you have to use a lot to justify its existence. And I will on the bike.

PS

I was a little confused about how the WiFi and Bluetooth work together on the camera and phone, until I found this:

"Bluetooth acts as the initial handshake between the camera and the phone, as well as maintains the connection after a period of inactivity with the Capture App. In older cameras, the Wi-Fi just stayed on the whole time if you had wireless turned on in the camera, which would drain the battery at a similar rate whether you were actively using the app or not. This is now different with Bluetooth.

So let's say you're lining up your shot with the App and you press record from your phone. You don't have to worry about turning the wireless off after that, because once you get on with your activity and the App hasn't been used for a little while, the camera will revert to Bluetooth. The connection is maintained in case you need to open up the App again and make a change (in which case Wi-Fi will kick back on), but the connection is maintained via Bluetooth and uses very little energy. It's kind of like the sleep mode on your computer; you're hardly using any energy but the device is ready to use again very quickly if needed."

So, wi-fi is the connection that you need to send the operational signals to the camera (record, stop record, etc.), and bluetooth is a low power way to maintain communication between the camera and app during standby periods, but bluetooth won't send the operational signals to the camera.

The benefit is that you won't have to spend your day connecting and disconnecting signals if you've set up the wi-fi and bluetooth connections already.

By the way Semigoodlooking what are your thoughts on micro SD cards?

I'm trying to decide whether to get a 32 or 64Gb card and also whether it definitely has to be 100Mb/s bitrate for 4k. Or will 80 suffice?

I'll probably avoid Kingston and go for SanDisk or Samsung.

What were you using?

Note:

Note: Mb/s = MegaBITS per second, while MB/s = MegaBYTES per second. Don't mix up the two. One is 8 times more than the other.

I bought a Samsung 64Gb SD card in the end and it works great in 4k as you can see from this test video. Amazing results!

Semigoodlooking

Sorry to hear about your battery cover being nicked. Could have happened anywhere I suppose?

A similar thing happened to me when i took my bike to be washed and one of the operatives stole a very important and weird shaped nut off the rear brake. They are designed not to fall off under any circumstances by the way.

Proving it of course was another matter.

Picked up an Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 5700XT yesterday which now gives me double the gaming performance.

It weighs in at 1.5Kg and 30cms long, so it was fun fititng it!

Scan UK, Overclockers and EBuyer spring to mind.

It's a beast!

I Just Upgraded To The ROG Strix RX-5700 XT GPU

Incoming...

https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-32GK650F-B-gaming-monitor#

This is a fantastic new monitor - 32", 2560x1440 resolution, 144hz and height adjustable.

Makes games truly immersive!

What is it? Looks like NVMe.