Surprise! The GoPro Hero 11 Black Mini is now shipping

When GoPro announced the Hero 11 Black in September, the action camera company also announced its smaller sibling, the Hero 11 Black Mini. 

As its name implies, the Mini is really just a smaller version of the Hero 11 Black, lacking a few hardware features such as built-in displays. Originally, the Hero 11 Black Mini was scheduled for a late October release, but that was eventually delayed with a new ship date of Nov. 18. 

But on Tuesday morning, GoPro announced the Hero 11 Black Mini is now shipping when ordered from GoPro.com. Best Buy is also accepting orders for the Hero 11 Black Mini, with a delivery date as soon as Friday, Nov. 11 when I checked. 

The regular price of the Mini is $399.99, but if you have a $50 a year GoPro subscription or sign up for the cloud storage service, GoPro drops the price to $299.98 for the Mini with the subscription. Not a bad deal at all. 

A GoPro subscription is well worth the investment. You get unlimited cloud storage for all of your GoPro footage, and the most recent addition to the service will take the automatically uploaded footage and photos and create a video on your behalf. You can then customize the creation or use it as is; either way, you don’t have to do any heavy lifting when it comes to deciding what to do with your captured footage. 

Also: The 5 best action cameras

As for the Hero 11 Black Mini. It has a small LED screen on the top of the housing next to the shutter button so you can see which shooting mode and settings are being used without having to use your smartphone. 

The back of the housing is covered in a heat sync to help keep the camera cool during use. The are two sets of mounting fingers that all recent GoPro’s use to attach to mounts and accessories. One set is on the rear of the camera, the other is on the bottom. 

As for video and photo capabilities, the Mini has an 8:7 sensor, implements HyperSmooth 5.0 for auto leveling and stabilization, and it records up to 5.3K video or captures photos of up to 24.7 megapixels.