HERO 7 Exposures

[cerja]

Would it be possible to add photo mode exposure functionality to HERO 7 Black line? I can't find any data on possible limits to this, considering that the shutter is digital. Even though HERO 7 is a bit outdated, the small form factor still makes it useful. Would be nice if this feature could be added.

[dnewman-gpsw]

Labs is no longer updating HERO7 (yes it is still a cool camera.) Is this is feature you see on newer cameras, as I don't understand the request?

[cerja]

Well let me clarify, hopefully I didn't get this wrong. I actually have two issues.

Firstly, there seems to be some ambiguity regarding the limits for exposure. As was explained in the issue 1194 (for anyone else reading this), the command to set a custom exposure is $EXPQ=x, where $x>1$ and represents exposure time through the formula $t_\text{exp}=\frac{1}{x}\ [s]$. This is somewhat in contradiction with Labs docs which specify that the number $x\in \{24,8000\}$. In theory, the EXPQ setting for Photo mode solves the fundamental problem GoPro-s have by lacking manual exposure times (shutter speeds) between 1/125 and 2 s (Normal photo mode has exposures ... 1/500, 1/250, 1/125 and Night photo mode has exposures 2, 5, 10 ...). By choosing a value $x\in \{1,8000\}$ one could achieve man exposure times among which some more notable ones would be: 1/8 ($x=8$), 1/4 ($x=4$), 1/2 ($x=2$) and 1 s ($x=1$). Is this correct and setting $x$ lower than 24 is acceptable even though docs say otherwise? In addition I suppose a more granular selection of exposures provided by Night mode is not advisable, since it would require setting $x<1$ (e.g. to get 4 s exposure, one would need to set $x=0.25$)?

The principle of digital shutter and thus exposure time should, hopefully, be similar between the various GoPro-s. So my request is, even though Labs for HERO7 is not being worked on any more, if adding this functionality is trivial, could it still be done?

[dnewman-gpsw]

Technically possible, practical not. Engineering and QA costs are way too high to do a retro release on such an old camera.