GoPro Hero11 Black Creator Edition review: Good camera, poor reliability

Almost three years ago I bought the GoPro Hero11 Black Creator Edition, which was a bundle of the GoPro Hero 11 Black camera, the Media Mod case for connecting an external microphone, the Volta selfie stick which also contains a battery for extended battery life, and the Light Mod flashlight. In addition to that, I also bought a couple of Samsung SD cards and a directional Røde microphone.

My goal with the camera was to use it for vlogging and travel videos, hence why I got the creator bundle. I never intended to record any action with it.

Overall, I cannot say that I'm very impressed by this setup and I will probably not buy a GoPro again, and I cannot recommend getting one for vlogging. Before I bought the GoPro Hero 11 Black, I read and watched many reviews of it, and got a very positive impression of it. So I'm a bit disappointed. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the reviewers are sponsored or want to stay in good favor with GoPro and therefore don't dare to criticize it.

Okay, this might sound overly negative. What I wanted from my vlogging camera was good image quality, 4K, 60 FPS, and 10-bit colors – all of which the GoPro 11 delivers (even 5.4K resolution). It also has good stabilization, and I like to have a slight fisheye effect to see a bit wider. And it's durable, so I'm never worried about throwing it in a backpack together with other things.

However, the problems and annoyances that I have experienced are:

• A couple of videos have been recorded without any audio. I always do a few short test recordings first, and those worked fine. So the first time this happened, I was a bit surprised when I got home and realized that my actual recording I was going to use didn't have any audio. So I just had to discard that video, and go out another day to record it again.
• A few times I have experienced, while recording a video, that the camera suddenly stops with a message along the lines of "Repairing file". It loads for a few seconds, and then the camera is working again. Then I have had to look at what got saved, and try to rerecord what I was just talking about.
• The camera itself is quite small. But with the Media Mod, which is basically required for vlogging, it becomes a lot bulkier and isn't waterproof anymore.
• To get to the SD card, it's necessary to detach the Volta selfie stick which has a hard-to-grab GoPro screw, open the Media Mod and remove the camera from it. The SD card is located deep inside the camera, and I do this process every time I want to get the SD card and put it in the computer to copy videos off it.
• It discharges very quickly. Always before using it, I need to charge it to make sure it has enough battery. Even without using it, leaving it completely turned off, it discharges unexpectedly quickly. It seems like the camera itself almost completely discharges within a week of not using it. The Volta selfie stick helps extend battery life to a tolerable level, so it's possible to use the camera a whole day for vlogging. Otherwise, I would need to buy and bring extra batteries, which would also require disassembling the Media Mod to switch.
• The video quality when recording in darkness is very poor. I have read that disabling the image stabilization and using a gimbal improves it somewhat. But this really doesn't seem to be this camera's strong suit.

Even though I wanted to like it, I find it completely unacceptable that a dedicated video camera would fail to record audio and randomly stop recording mid-video. I have searched both issues, but haven't found any answer. I expected it to be reliable, but sadly it fails in that regard.

For now, the camera works well enough. But when it's time for me to upgrade, I will look at other brands, since I don't trust GoPro anymore after my experiences with this camera.