Is there a Go Pro like camera that offers the ability to change lenses?

With out a giant price increase.

$550.00 for the cam and $170.00 for a closeup lens ( under two feet.

Another lens for a three shot distance

And one more for car pics ,side views

The go pro distortion is obscene.

I found the E1 by a company called Z. Interchangeable lens (can work with Olympus mirror less lens) for about $699. Link



Other than the article I know nothing more.

GoPro cameras are designed to be POV “action cameras,” and so they have super-wide-angle lenses.

The distortion is not actually a property of the lens, per se (unless you are using the “SuperView” fisheye super-ultra-wide-angle mode). The field of view of a wide angle lens means the objects in the image are much closer to the camera than they look, which causes perspective distortion.

To give an example, take the side-view of a car example you mention. With a camera that approximated your eyes’ field of view (excluding peripheral vision), you might be 30 feet away to get the entire car in frame. So, the middle of the car, say, the driver’s door handle, is 30 feet away from the camera. The ends of the car, say, the headlights and taillights, are about 32 feet away (because they’re at an angle). That’s not much difference in distance and not much change in visible size.

With a GoPro, you could get the whole car in frame from 3 feet away. But if the camera is 3 feet from the driver’s door handle, it’s 10 feet away from the headlights and taillights. Because they’re more than 3x farther away, they look more than 3x smaller and the car looks super distorted.

This happens with your eyes when you’re close to something, too, but your brain kind of corrects for it so you don’t really notice.

The way to fix this isn’t to get a lens that doesn’t distort, because it isn’t really the lens that is the problem.

The way to fix it is to move further away from your subject to reduce perspective distortion.

Now, that will cause it’s own problems - now you’ve got a tiny little car in the middle of your video frame.

On most cameras, the way to fix THAT would be to switch to a longer focal length lens (e.g., a “normal” lens - on a 35mm film camera or full-frame DSLR, a 50mm lens approximates what your eyes expect to see).

On a GoPro, you can’t change the lens. HOWEVER, the sensor in a GoPro is much higher resolution than is required for video. For years, GoPros have had a setting that lets you “crop” the field of view to simulate a longer focal length lens while still capturing full resolution video. They call it “digital lens.”

The narrowest FOV option on a GoPro is still pretty wide-angle (about equivalent to a 24mm lens on a film camera), but will still result in drastically less perspective distortion than the SuperView fisheye and ultra-wide-angle rectilinear shots GoPros are known for.

If you don’t want to do action video, you would probably be best off just buying a camcorder with a built-in zoom lens.

The best video quality on a reasonable budget would be a mirrorless camera (like an SLR without the mirror). Some models from several years ago available very affordably on the used market can capture broadcast-quality video. E.g. Top Gear used Panasonic GH-series mirrorless cameras for their aerial drone footage for several years. However, actually capturing good video with this type of equipment is not trivial, there is a lot more to manage than with a GoPro or camcorder. In particular, maintaining accurate focus is much harder.