Anyone in the market for a Gopro is strongly advised to look at these forums:

Black Plus Focal problem 01

Black Plus Focal Problem 02

I’ve done a side by side test and can confirm that the new Black plus is set to keep objects under 4 feet in focus and leave everything else out of focus! 😯

Pick up those Gopro Black bargains while you can. It’s the better camera.

The wheels seem to be falling off for Go Pro. The go pro 3 had issues and now this most recent release has its problems.

It’s also fairly certain that they’ve used Blacks to represent images allegedly captured by Plus’s. They seemed to forget that motorbikes have mirrors that clearly show Blacks being used! It’s pretty bad.

Hmm wonder if the push to get an annual update is backfiring a bit. I was a bit surprised that they’d only just fixed the 3 problems when the 3+ came out.

Is that affecting video as well? The links seem to be all about stills.

Re the demo vids- the prototype Pluses were built in the older casing, they weren’t identical but very very similiar, is it possible that’s what you’re seeing there?

NW- I got a Black Plus for testing using GoPro’s 30 no questions return and can confirm that the problem affects both footage and stills. It’s very noticeable if you’re used to the Black’s picture quality.

The images used to promote the Plus are lovely, and they have a lot of noticeably sharp background detail. It’s proven impossible to capture that sharp detail with the Plus, but possible to replicate a similar level of sharpness with the original Black.

That’s really poor 🙁 Mate of mine had one of the proto Pluses and it didn’t have this issue. Hope it’s a software fix…

Doubt it. The lens has a fixed focal length. The detail it loses in the mid and far distance can’t be recreated with a firmware fix. If it’s not there at capture, it’s not coming back. You could crack open the camera and try turning the lens a bit… 😐

That’s interesting about your mate’s prototype Plus. Tell me more!

Don’t know very much about it tbh, he got it a while back- he was a tester for the first HD as well I think, or maybe the 960.

BikeRadar had a video up showing side by side footage of the black vs black+. Both looked good, black+ looked better imo. Is this an intermittent problem or is the video faked?

Edit: Link

None of the reviews reflect the real world behaviour of the lens. In some cases, it’s been proven that they’ve swapped the samples around, probably by mistake: ‘This image is sharper therefore it must be the Plus’. My side by side tests consistently showed the Black to be noticeably sharper every time.

It might be that the review version is different to the consumer one, in which case the reviews are largely pointless. Either way, the Plus will give you a softer (best described as ‘a bit mushy’), image unless you have it pointed directly at your face for the entire sequence.

Something else to take into consideration. The Plus has new contrast and colour control profiles. These gives a very dynamic and punchy image if you leave Protune turned off. It achieves this at the loss of almost all detail in dark areas. The original Black’s auto profile retains an excellent amount of information in dark areas, allowing for a good deal of tuning, even out of Protune. The Plus pretty much records a deep shadow as an untunable pure black mass.

Edit: Youtube is never a good way to judge image quality but the Bikeradar footage does seem to show the issue, especially in the forest sections in the second half. Running the raw footage on the PC really brings this out.