Sorry...

That's what i was trying to create, a new one for bugs and problems (this camera has so many that should be useful), freezing, red light of death, color shifting in cam raw...

I agree with Ralph. The 'Sandisk' brand is notorious for being used by Chinese counterfeiters. I have only used 64GB UHS-1 cards in my GoPro3, and have had no troubles.

Please note that UHS-1 SDXC cards will be damaged if plugged into the SD card adapters in many computers. I have used SDXC adapters from Komputerbay, and an Expresscard adapter from Transcend, without difficulty, however. This is apparently because the older interface hardware does not give clean signals to the lightning fast UHS-1 card interface pins. When I started using UHS-1 cards I blew up two before realizing what was going on...

I'm one of the bad lucky guys.. got a bad camera. It was freezing just before the update, and now its almost dead. Mode button does not work anymore. In order to not f..k the original topic with sad stories I think its a good idea to use this one instead.

What I've read so far, is that there are many malfunctions cameras that can act strangely, overheat and burn the micro sd card. Not sure if its a card or camera problem, I bought the camera a week ago at B&H with the recommended sandisk 32gb card. The card works normal outside the camera (with the provided adapter).. I contact the GP guys by email and they gave me an generic answer "You need update with the new firmware and blablabla ".. this new firmware is not that new, its the December version.. and to be honest, most of my camera problems came after this update.

Got my GP3 Black yesterday and ordered the 64gb Sandisk UHS-1 micro. Hope that new firmware helps.

Go Pro Hero 3 Black just died on me after only a months usage. Will not start up at all. I hear this is a quite common problem. There are some youtube videos that supposedly offer help to fix the problem but really dont. Anyone here has an idea if there is something that user can do to fix it or is it simply best to return the crappy thing.

@peternap Thanks!

Ok I had it without a battery for a few hours and indeed it seems it came back alive. Before that I also tried the hard reset but it did not do anything for my cam. Well, really nasty temper then :) My point is they are trying to sell these as pro cameras... such failure to start up on random occasion for a tool thats supposed to funtion on a paid gig earns a reputation of little more than that just bad temper on my books :)

My GP3 Black worked fine the first 5 times, after that I only get the NO SD message. Used a Sandisk 32gb class10 card. Tried 2 other cards, no luck. It were existing cards, so possible not the right format. Ordered a brand new Samsung card now, that is my last attempt. Formatting the Sandisk card on my Mac also did not help. I can see the card on my Mac, no problem, but not in the GP3. It looks like the Sandisk card killed my GP3 card reader.... al other functions on the camera still work properly. Any ideas anyone? (btw: I'm from Holland, bought my camera in Austin, TX)

@trevmar So the Samsung ones are stable? I know the GoProUser forum has a done bunch of testing, and the GoPro Ultra microSD cards are very random in performance from one card to the next. Many can't sustain a write speed high enough for the GoPro 3 Black at higher quality/frame rate settings. Going on vacation next week, so maybe I'll pick up a Samsung card just in case.

@griplimited

I used a Sandisk 64GB for a 4 hour shoot with the 4K @ 15 FPS video format. I had it in the frame and it didn't seem to overheat. However, it stopped recording after about 3 hours.

I bought a 64 GB Transcend card and let it run for 14 hours continuously the other night with no problems. The Sandisk card is now my backup card. I am not sure that it is defective or not. However, I know that the Transcend card works great.

@BBT Yes, the Samsung microSDXC are stable. The problem with the Sandisk UHS-1 is that they have garbage collection / sector allocation which occasionally takes a long time (I have seen 700msec on one test). The Samsung are a lot faster, and all three of my 64GB Samsungs work for 3 hrs continuous with 2.7K Protune in my two GoPro blacks. Three out of my 10 Sandisk seem stable enough to use, but I would only use them once my Samsungs are filled. I test each new card by recording (several times) from USB power for the maximum time the card will allow with 2K7 Protune. But you can use the Windoze program IOmeter to measure the delay between successive writes if you want to do things analytically...

It's the card. GoPro even stopped stocking Sandisk cards because of their continued compatibility issues, and dropped the recording bitrate in firmware because of it (down to 35mb/s vs 45mb/s for newly qualified cards). The Ultras are very inconsistent in their write speeds.