Hoping to drive sales of the device in the run up to Christmas, GoPro said over the weekend it’d cut the price of its cube-shaped camera to $199 – that’s a full $200 off its original price when it launched back in the summer.
The Hero4 Session was criticized for its hefty $399 price tag when it first hit the market, and two price cuts in as many months suggest consumers aren’t interested in spending that much on a basic action camera that has no screen or 4K recording capabilities.
While serious filmmakers will be more interested in GoPro’s feature-rich $499 Hero4 Black camera with superior image quality, the company has been marketing the Session at occasional users looking for a fun toy, or, as GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said in a release announcing the new price tag, as a way “to capture rough-and-tumble family activities this holiday season.”
The Session fires up at the touch of a button, can shoot Full HD 1080 at 30 fps, snap 8-megapixel images, and is waterproof to 33 feet (10 meters). It comes with built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabling easy connectivity to the GoPro app so you can quickly view, edit, and share content straight from your smartphone.
The camera’s new price is certainly more in line with what we would’ve expected at the outset for such a device. Now at only $100 more than the similar Polaroid Cube camera, consumers who were looking at the cheaper of the two might now be tempted to pay out a few extra bucks for the more robust Session camera, which sports a superior spec list and, more importantly, better video quality.
Speaking of Polaroid, the company recently took GoPro to court, accusing it of copying the design of the Cube. Lawyers acting for Polaroid are aiming to secure a sales ban of GoPro’s box-shaped device, so with that in mind, and with the new price tag offering a significant saving, this looks like the time to get the Session if you’ve recently been considering it.
