GoPro Hero4 Session: a price to pay for shrinkage

The price of vanity: wasting precious slope-time in search of the perfect action selfie on a short day of a short ski season.

The human body responds curiously to very cold air. Extremities go numb, blood drains from the surface, muscles shiver, fine motor skills depart … and then, of course, there’s the shrinkage.

The brain struggles, too — concentration is an effort, ­patience erodes.

Put someone on top of a mountain in winter and sooner or later they’ll be a shivering wreck with the attention span of a five-year-old and the mouth of a stevedore.

Standing, as I was recently, near the highest point in Australia — even on a sunny day when the only snow to be seen was created by giant atomisers the night ­before — you’re aware of the temperature hovering near freezing.

This is especially true when your ski gloves are off and you’ve spent the past 10 minutes on your knees, fingers clumsily fiddling with little screws and brackets as you remove a camera the size of an ice cube from your helmet and attach it to your ski, or pole, or chest, or wrist, or back to your helmet again.

The price of vanity: wasting precious slope-time in search of the perfect action selfie on a short day of a short ski season.

GoPro, which has come to define the entire category of action cameras the way Lycra has for skin-hugging clothing, clearly thought of this scenario when designing its new Hero4 Session camera.

It’s a tiny black cube comprising a lens on one side and a big button on another. Simple: fasten it, aim it, go. If you press the button once it’ll shoot video at 720 or 1080 resolution at 30 or 60 frames per second; hold it down for a moment and you’ll get bursts of 8-megapixel still images at 10fps.

In theory, the Session is a brilliantly simple and effective tool for capturing the moment. It’s half the size and much lighter than other GoPros, cutting wind and water drag and reducing that odd feeling of having a small rock attached to you.

The Session’s cube shape means it can be mounted in any way and it will ensure the image is right-way up, and there’s a clever innovation with recording sound: it boasts a microphone on the front and another on the back, so when there’s wind rushing past it automatically switches to the mic capturing clearer sound.

Even with frozen fingers I found it easy to attach, aim and shoot with the Session. It’s also rugged and waterproof to 10 ­metres without a case, making it by far the most physically versatile camera of its kind.

The trouble arises when you want to do either of two things: ­review your work or go off-piste with the shooting mode.

Unlike some other GoPros there is no playback screen on the camera, which means you have to download an app on to your smartphone, connect to the Session over WiFi and wait for the app to read and display your shots. If the connection is poor — as it frequently was for me — you’ll either run out of patience or opt to wait until you’ve finished surfing, skating, skiing or whatever other activity it is that you’re doing.

That’s the thing with action sports: you want to keep going, not stop to pull out your phone.

Changing basic shooting modes — from 720 at 60fps to 1080 at 30fps, for example — can be done on the camera with the aid of a second much smaller button on another face of the cube, but anything else requires the app or a separately sold remote control ($120).

This brings us to price: at $579 the Session costs the same as the GoPro Hero4 Silver, but the Silver has more shooting modes and better image quality — it can shoot 720p at 120fps and 12MP photos at 30 frames per second, is waterproof in its case to 40m and has instant playback through a built-in touch screen.

The Session may be smaller and lighter but to exploit all its physical versatility you need more mounts than you get out of the box, which means spending even more money. There’s the hand strap ($89.95), three-way handheld stick ($109.95), chest mount ($59.95), head strap and clip ($34.95) and flexible clamp ($79.95), among a myriad of mounts.

Before you know it, you’ve dropped the better part of $1000. And that’s odd because the Session seems perfectly designed for entry-level action heroes, but it’s priced for pros who may be more inclined to buy the more feature-rich Silver or Black models.

Everything comes at a cost. If it’s lightness, simplicity and physical versatility you want, the ­Session is brilliant.

But you compromise on functionality and easy playback. If you want richer features and instant playback I’d choose the larger, heavier Silver.

GoPro deserves to be synonymous with action cameras because it sets the bar higher than anyone else, but it has yet to design the perfect model.