Getting to the top of the One World Trade Center is supposed to be impossible, or at the very least difficult, but it seems that's not so. In a video released yesterday but shot back in September of 2013, three BASE jumpers show that they not only got up to the top... they managed to jump off with parachutes and get off scot-free until months later.
Action cam footage we've featured ranges from spectacular aerial shots taken using a DJI Phantom drone, to unbelievable extreme sports stunts, to animals who are so keen on getting their own GoPro they're willing to steal yours. This, however, is the first time we've seen a shark attack filmed from the first person perspective.
Here's something crazy to help you shake off the gear fever all of this morning's announcements probably induced. This footage supposedly captures what a GoPro saw after it was dropped from a skydiving airplane, survived that several thousand foot fall, and landed smack in a pigpen where one of Babe's relatives tried to have it for lunch.
If there's a secret contest going on for most terrifying action camera video, then 25-year-old skydiver James Lee recently gave the skydivers in the mid-air plane crash a run for their money. In a terrifying video captured on the veteran skydiver's helmet cam, you see him get knocked unconscious just seconds after jumping, and then get rescued by his fellow skydivers.
GoPro cameras, or rather action cameras in general, are amazing little devices that have enabled people to capture everything from the exciting to the harrowing to the downright weird. But there's something they don't put on action cam packaging that they should. The question: "do you actually do anything exciting worthy of an action cam?"
For late night show host and comedian Conan O'Brien the answer is a definitive 'No,' and so he put the GoPros he supposedly got for Christmas (it feels a bit more like an advertising stunt to us) to use in the most mundane ways imaginable as part of a funny new segment called 'Complete Waste of a GoPro.'
On December 11th, Ferdinand Puentes captured many people's worst nightmare on video: his plane making an emergency water landing.
Puentes enjoys capturing takeoffs and landings, and so his GoPro was already rolling on that fateful day when something very bad happened to the single engine of the small plane in which he was a passenger.
Oh GoPro, the action cam crown must rest uneasy on thy sweaty brow. CES has been flush with announcements of new entrants in the wearable camera market, and now Polaroid joins the scrum with a handful of new models. (All manufactured by Polaroid licensee and troubled asset specialist C&A Marketing.)
Liquid Image, mainly known for its line of scuba masks with integrated underwater cameras, is getting into the action cam business in a big way with the first model to support media streaming via a 4G LTE phone connection.
Sony is looking to take 4K video into the mainstream at CES this year by releasing its first compact camcorder that supports the beyond-HD standard.
We've seen some pretty terrifying stuff captured on action camera before, but this one ties with the skydivers who got hurled into empty space when their planes collided. It was uploaded by a BASE jumper who, on November 24th, took a leap that was almost his last.
The very first GoPro was sold by company founder and CEO Nick Woodman out of his van all the way back in 2004, and it took 35mm film. Fast forward 9 years and now Woodman is a billionaire whose creation is officially the best-selling camera in the entire world.
The kinds of stunts the rise of action cameras has allowed us to capture in POV are often scary, but more often than not they're also planned. However, for nine skydivers, the footage their helmet mounted GoPros captured recently wasn't planned in the least, and it will likely be the most terrifying thing you see all week... or month... or year.
If you like the idea of having a GoPro or other action cam to capture all of your daredevil stunts but don't readily have several hundred to drop on one, the company Pyle Audio just debuted something you might be interested in.
With all of these upcoming digital camera announcements rumored for October, nobody was paying particular attention to GoPro until today, when the company unveiled the followup to its popular Hero3, the Hero3+ -- a smaller, lighter and more capable new offering for adventure junkies everywhere.
Sony clearly felt there was a gap in the action cam mount market that needed filling. And so, in addition to providing mounts for everything from surfers to scuba divers, Sony Japan had just debuted an action cam mount for man's best friend.
In most ways the smartphone is the height of convenience. Phone, check; computer, check; camera, check. But one market the smartphone seems well suited for, but hasn't yet broken into with any reasonable force, is the action cam market.
One of the reasons for this (lack of serious image stabilization and durability aside) seems to simply be camera placement. Given where the lens is, mounting your phone as an action cam anywhere but your chest seems unrealistic or, at the very least, aerodynamically unwise. The new G90 Action Sports Camera case from G-Form addresses this exact problem.
'Tis the season of mergers, acquisitions, and investments. At around the same time Adobe announced its acquisition of Behance yesterday, Taiwanese gadget manufacturer Foxconn (officially known as Hon Hai Precision) announced that it has snatched up 8.88% of GoPro for $200 million. The deal values the California-based action-camera maker at a whopping $2.25 billion.
Could Panasonic be planning to jump into the action camera market and compete against the likes of GoPro? A recently published US design patent suggests that it might be the case. The patent, first spotted by 43 Rumors, was filed in December of last year but published a week ago. Simply titled, "Digital Camera," it contains a series of simple illustrations showing what appears to be a pocket-sized durable action camera.
At a special event in San Francisco tonight, GoPro launched its latest action camera: the Hero3. Compared to the Hero2 that it succeeds, the new camera is both more portable and more capable. It's 30% smaller and 25% lighter, making it great for helmet cams and attaching to random things. The image processor inside is twice as fast, allowing the camera to shoot both video and photographs at faster frame rates.
Where the action cam market is concerned, GoPro is king. For the last few years if you wanted to go sky diving, snowbording, mountain biking, or any other extreme sport and video tape yourself doing it, you'd probably be strapping a GoPro to one of your appendages. Sony and JVC, however, are looking to get in on some of the extreme sports action -- and both are doing it in style with new action cam offerings.