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Let me give you the scoop. My brother & I got a GoPro Helmet Hero HD for Christmas (they go for about $300). I intended it to be mostly used in the winter. We had no problems with it in the winter, and it served our purposes very well. We didnt have much good snow to work with, and the days were very gray, but that's not the fault of the camera. The only thing tiny tiny problem was that it lost charge kinda quickly when it was very cold.
Yesterday, I decided to take the camera for it's first summer time spin, in Lake George NY. It was beyond convenient. All we had to do was attach a little blue float thing (for a boar key) to the camera's waterproof housing, so the camera wouldn't sink. The GoPro captured the colors so well, it was easy to use, and from the few underwater shots we got, I was stunned at the quality. Again, no problems while using it. And as for the battery, we used it for a few hours and it only lost a sliver of charge.
I'll be going out to Mt. Hood in a little more than a week, and the GoPro will be very convenient to fit in any small bag, instead of trying to bring an HV30.
Bottom line: My advice - buy a GoPro if you're considering it. It's very fun to use in the summer, along with in the winter obviously too. The color is great, and problems are non-existent (at least for me).
Thanks for reading.
If you're interested in the Lake George edit I'm talking about, here it is. I still need to do some fine tuning on getting the color reallllly rich, but it's good for now:
Diving Boards & Cliff Jumping At Lake George from OSP on Vimeo.
Click this link to see on Vimeo in HD:
http://vimeo.com/13169277
