Does The New GoPro Hero4 Black Have The Australia Tax? Sort Of…

While you slept, GoPro announced three new additions to its family of awesome action cameras: the uber-expensive Hero4 Black, its cheaper cousin the Hero4 Silver, and the cut-price camera confusingly just called Hero. GoPro being a US-company and all might lead you to believe that its new product may carry the Australia Tax, and you’d be kind of be right.

Let’s take a look at the Hero4 flagship: the Hero4 Black. For starters, the Hero4 Black looks almost identical to the Hero 3+ Black from last year. The recording indicator buttons are in a slightly different place, the button on the side is slightly larger, and the battery door is now on the bottom instead of on the back. Other than that, only tiny aesthetic details separate them. But, as they say, it’s what’s inside that counts.

GoPro’s 2014 flagship camera finally brings a lot of the features professionals have been begging for, most significantly: 4K video at 30 frames per second, and 1080p video at a mouth-watering 120 frames per second. The GoPro Hero 3 Black could manage 4K at 15fps, but that wasn’t useful for, well, much of anything really. 30fps is the industry standard, and as such, your action cam can now shoot footage that will look awesome should you happen to own a 4K TV or monitor, and future-proofs you for when you do. GoPro’s new promo video was shot in 4K, and I got to see it on a large UHD TV. Indeed it is impressive.

So the sensor’s big, but so is the price: the GoPro Hero4 Black will run you $679 in Australia. Compare that to the US price, and we start to see the problem. It’s $US499 for our Amerifriends.

That’s a bit of an issue on first glance, but if you do some maths, you realise it’s not as bad as all that.

Convert that $US499 to #TeamAustralia money and it costs you $573 (mostly because our dollar sucks right now at 87 cents to the $US1). Add 10 per cent for the GST on top of that and you get a grand total cost of $630.30 for the GoPro Hero4 Black in Kangaroo dollars.

That’s an Australia Tax penalty of $48.70, which one might argue could be the cost of getting the thing over to our country from the US in the first place. If you’re over in the States and thinking about buying a Hero4 Black, it’s worth pulling the proverbial trigger on your purchase. If you’re buying from Australia and really want to save that $50, research international shipping services like HopShopGo and Shipito.

It’s worth noting, however, that the new camera at the bottom of the range, the Hero, costs less in Australia than it does in the US (on the sticker at least): the Hero in the US will cost you $US129.99, while the same camera in Australia will cost you $129. That’s a whole $US0.99 cheaper. Convert it to Australian money from US and you find yourself paying $34.29 than you need to, plus whatever shipping costs.

The more you know.


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