GoPro made an AI Camera, and its icky.

GoPro just released a new advertisement for their new "GP3-Powered" Cameras, which was designed to "Improve image quality in Low-Light Capture, Runtimes, and Thermal Capture." The problem is, they released the image, and they are ... terrible.

Here's the three images that I was presented when I was perusing my timeline:

Man, these pictures look good, right? Except, I made these images clickable. At first glance, these images look good. Images at low light, but then if you spend more than a second looking at any of these images, the entire illusion falls apart.

Now, I will try to take these pictures as a grain of salt. These are compressed Facebook images. However, I went to their official press release and made sure that the artifacting was because the original image was caused by the capture and original compression. Let's start with the first image. At first glance, it looks great, right? Except when you zoom in on the eye, there's a significant amount of artifacting and loss of contrast around the top of the eye. The eye is in focus, but the top of the eye is just ... smushed. It just looks like they captured this at 12800 ISO or something.

Then, we move onto the background. While the contrasting line between the decent lit background and her leg is sharp(ish), the fur just blurs into nothingness due to the contrast issues. The background is the worst offender of this image. The background is ISO artifacted to all hell. It makes it look so bad. I guess they lit a fire and there are embers floating in the background, and those embers have zero focus, showing up as shadowed blurry blobs that just don't look good.

When I pull up the fur, it looks pretty bad because its suffering from multiple ailments. Parts of the fur are in focus, and then there are parts of the fur that are so blurry that you can't tell what it is. Since there's a lot of contrast issues, you're looking at a mess of... whatever this is.

The second picture isn't any better. While the framing is cool, I am not entirely sure on what they are focusing on here. The hair just behind the bridle is in perfect focus, but nothing else is. We have some high focus on the gross undercarriage of the horse, but everything else is out of focus and problematic. Let's take the eye of the horse. Its hair above the eye is somewhat in focus, but it looks like it has some AI-Artifacting from the model not understanding horse hair, but then you get to the eye and its not in focus. The blacks are covered in High ISO Artifacting. GoPro is advertising this as "better in low light," but I don't see this at all. It looks terrible.

Next, let's get into the mane. Now, usually with motion blur, you want to do that to convey movement, but there's an issue here. The movement is vertical, not horizontal. Its just... blurry. The horse hair is just like one mass of nothingness and it makes for a terrible picture. It might look good on video footage, but this is a photo, and this photo is bad. Very bad.

Finally, we need to get into the small clip of the cowboy. The hand is a blurry mess going in a random direction. The darker colors are covered in ISO spackle. The horse hair is obviously being processed by the AI, but its being selectively processed, and I don't think the model fully understood what is going on in the picture, so it just kind of guessed.

Now, I as going to get into the third picture, but, I'll be honest, it suffers from the exact same issues as the first two images, and I don't understand how GoPro can think this is a good set of images to come up with. Now, it could be that the resolution was low, so I decided to go to the GoPro website and see if they had a higher resolution version of these three photos, but, nope. They don't even offer high resolution versions of these photos, at least normally, and I think that is on purpose. But, I am not one to just take that the lower resolution is the only photos they have, so, I downloaded the higher resolution image that wasn't on the press release I first saw, and... nope, its still pretty shit resolution at 1920x711, and that's for two pictures in one.

I'm sure whomever is the photographer for GoPro is an excellent photographer. These pictures, in the hands of an experienced photographer with a proper DSLR Lens would make these to be absolutely phenomenal. I am, by no means, knocking the person who snapped these pictures. They are framed up pretty well, and, if this photographer used a proper size lens, I guarantee these pictures would look absolute gorgeous. However, a GoPro suffers the same issue that every action camera suffers from, and that is aperture. The size of the aperture is too low to let in enough light to allow for similar low light conditions with less ISO Artifacting. No amount of AI Grift Generative Model is going to restore light information that doesn't exist.

Now, why did I do this? Well, GoPro had the audacity to say:

These pictures don't even show consumer-grade quality photos. I have seen iPhones produce better quality photos than what GoPro has presented here. Someone messed up.