![]() I do a lot of shooting where I don’t need a screen or monitor the footage at all. To me, it seems as though it’s designed primarily for scenarios where you set it up, mount it, and shoot without changing anything. The Mini works great if you want a physically smaller action camera. There’s also no GPS support, which means you lose out on a few features in the Quik app. You can pull 24-megapixel stills out of 5.3K video clips-which, to be honest, is all I do anyway-but there is no dedicated photo mode, and no ability to shoot RAW photos like you have in the Hero 11 Black. That said, there is one big thing missing and one small thing to be aware of. The Mini uses the same sensor, shoots at the same video resolutions and frame rates, and to my eyes and ears, produces the same results. The internals of the Mini are nearly identical to the Hero 11 Black. As of this writing, there is no pass-through door for plugging in a USB cable, but you can just pull off the side door and plug in a USB-C cable in it that way. You can power it with an external power pack. But the difference is that you can swap batteries on the Black and you can’t on the Mini. The same settings on the Hero 11 Black lasted 73 minutes. The Hero 11 Mini claims 73 minutes when shooting 5.3K at 30 frames per second. The good news is that the battery inside is the same as the Enduro that’s now standard on the Hero 11 Black, so shooting times are pretty close. The other big difference is there’s no removable battery. Again, I see this as a huge advantage for helmet mounting since it will get you a forward-looking shot without sticking the camera up as high on the helmet. Like the full size, there are two feet on the bottom, but you also get a rear mount to point the camera forward. The Mini has not one, but two sets of flip-down feet for mounting. There are two other small design differences from the Hero 11 Black. ![]() That said, this seems like a flaw that could easily be solved by a software or firmware update. The message here is that if frequently changing shooting modes is a part of your workflow, the Mini is not for you. You either have to do it on the camera, which is a tedious process with the single-line LCD screen, or you have to pull out the app, which honestly, is also tedious. That makes switching video modes difficult. ![]() Moving Timelapse mode didn’t bother me that much once I figured it out, but what it means is that you can’t save presets here in the main menu like you can in the Black. It’s when you click to change your video settings that you’ll also find Timelapse, along with all other special modes like Star Trails, Light Painting, and so on. But in the Quik interface for the Mini, there is only one button: Video. In the interface for the Black, there are three shooting modes: Video, Timelapse, and Photo. At first, I thought the Mini did not support Timelapse mode because it’s not a menu item in the Quik app. The app works fine, and the transition from screen to app is easy-the app is mostly the same menus as you get with the screen interface, with one notable exception. ![]() Even the shots where I am not going to be monitoring them constantly-like when I’ve strapped the Hero 11 to the front of my paddleboard or surfboard-I still set up everything using the rear screen. Until the Mini arrived, I’ll confess I had never really used the Quik app to set up my GoPro. There is technically a tiny LCD on top of the camera to show you things like the current shooting mode, but to frame your shots and delve into settings, the Mini requires the GoPro Quik app. The Mini eliminates at least the possibility of this happening. The big screens on the Hero 11 Black are the most vulnerable points, and most of the destroyed GoPros I’ve seen usually have cracked screens or lenses. This has the distinct advantage of making the Mini more rugged. To save that space, GoPro got rid of all the screens on the Mini. Where it's smaller is the width, which is 20 mm less than the full-size camera. The Mini is technically about 4 mm thicker but the same height as the full-size Hero 11. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, and in some ways, it isn’t, but for situations where wind resistance and drag are factors-on your motorcycle helmet, for example-it’s a big enough deal that any size reduction helps. The Hero 11 Mini is 13 percent smaller than the Hero 11 Black.
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