OK then.

I had a Hero3 White.
It was extremely picky about the MicroSD cards that it would work with. I have about 12 and only 2 of them worked at all. The rest just gave a card error, even if I reformatted them first. When I called support, they basically told me that I should stop buying ****ty cards.

All of the cards work perfectly in all my other devices.

Once a card had been formatted in the GoPro, it was often very difficult to get it to work in another device. In one case I could only get it to be recognized in my Panasonic camera. It wouldn't WORK in it but the camera recognized it. Then I formatted it, and it was then recognized (but not working) in my Win7 PC card reader. I had to format it twice more in the PC before it worked right again.

The loop recording, where it erased the oldest file after the card filled up to do continuous recording (car mode, essentially) only worked if you started recording with space left on the card. If the card was already full when you hit record, it just said "card full" and shut off. Since I just put it on "one button record" and was just pushing the button and shoving off as soon as I heard a beep, I didn't know for days that it wasn't actually recording.

Support didn't even really believe that happened, or if it did said it was probably due to me buying crappy cards. I bought their recommended card, a 16GB Sandisk Ultra class 10. It did the same thing. They just shrugged.

I had one instancewhere the camera just couldn't record to the card that I'd been using for days, and couldn't format it either. I had to just not record that day, and when I got home, song and dance the card into working on the PC, reformat it, then reformat it in the camera, then it would work again.

Also it's a damned awkward camera to mount, physically. Just a weird shape. It looks like a brick duct taped to your helmet.

All that combined with the fact that the picture quality and low light performance of the White version are honestly sub par for a camera costing more than $100, and I just gave up and ebay'd it. I'm far more happy with the camera I have now, it's very similar to the Sony ActionCam but it's a lot cheaper, smaller and has a few more nice features.


Please note that ALL of these are probably firmware problems, which means they could probably fix them - if they didn't already think that their product was perfect in every way. Maybe they're already fixed. Maybe it was just the White version, though as a software developer myself I'd think that if they are using separate firmware libraries for SD card handling in their three cameras, they're really not very smart. Odds are that these problems were cross product (and again, they might all be fixed by now for all I know).

Unfortunately they are things that you can't know until you get it in hand.