GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILS

Introduction

GoPro has spent two decades making rugged, sports-ready cameras that don’t ask much of the user: mount it somewhere fun, hit the record button and let HyperSmooth sort out the rest. The Mission 1 Pro ILS is a break from the norm. It’s still unmistakably a GoPro, with the same boxy, compact body, but sat on the front is a Micro Four Thirds mount. Simply put, it’s GoPro’s first attempt at an interchangeable-lens camera.

This one change transforms the ILS from an action camera into something closer to a compact cinema camera. Instead of a single fixed lens, you can now bolt on whatever glass suits the shot: a fast prime for low light, a specialist macro lens, or even old optics you’ve picked up second-hand. It might be the most flexible camera GoPro has ever made, while also being the least forgiving – there’s no autofocus here, and precious little of the safety net that’s made past GoPro cameras so easy to live with.

I spent two weeks with the ILS, paired with a manual Laowa prime lens in order to find out whether that trade-off is worth it. Here’s what I found.

Design and Build Quality

• Micro Four Thirds lens mount compatible with third-party lenses
• 197g body (without a lens) with standard GoPro mounting options
• Weatherproof but not dive-ready due to MFT lenses

Set the Mission 1 Pro ILS next to the standard Mission 1 Pro and the two cameras look 90% the same. They share the same boxy shape, 2.59-inch rear touchscreen and 1.4-inch front display, and the same mounting options (GoPro fingers, tripod thread and magnetic mount) on the base.

The difference is on the front. In place of the regular Mission 1 Pro’s fixed 14mm lens, the ILS carries a Micro Four Thirds mount, opening the door to hundreds of lenses old and new. GoPro keeps an official compatibility list if you want to check a lens before you buy, and it covers everything from fisheyes to vintage primes. If you’ve got a box of old MFT glass in a cupboard, or an MFT adapter for other lenses, this is a GoPro that can likely put them to use.

That flexibility doesn’t come without a cost, of course, and where the standard Mission 1 Pro will happily go 20 metres underwater without a housing, the ILS is rated weatherproof only; GoPro hasn’t claimed anything more specific than that, but I wouldn’t want to use the camera in anything above a light rain shower. It’s not what I’m used to from a brand renowned or making the best action cameras, but at the same time I fully understand why it’s the case.

GoPro has kept the body remarkably compact: 89.6 x 58.7 x 46.1mm and 197g including the battery, which is a touch lighter than the fixed-lens Mission 1 Pro; bolt on a lens and it’ll get heavier, of course, but it’s still a small and easily mountable camera. Next to my own Panasonic Lumix GH6 – a fine camera, but not lightweight – it’s a different beast entirely.

Performance

• Full manual focus and aperture, aided by focus peaking
• Loses horizon lock and subject tracking versus the standard Mission 1 Pro
• Enduro 2 battery rated at up to 96 minutes in 8K Open Gate

Coming from a standard Mission 1 Pro, the biggest adjustment by far is the total absence of autofocus. GoPro offers focus peaking to help compensate, but on screens this small I found getting pin-sharp shots a struggle at times; more than once I thought I’d nailed the focus, only to find the shot soft when I checked it later. Annoyingly, peaking doesn’t work at all on the front screen, which is unhelpful if you’re trying to frame a piece to camera. This feels like something GoPro could fix with a firmware update, so I hope it does.

There are better ways to check focus than the rear screen alone. GoPro’s Quik app offers its own peaking preview, and a dedicated Mission Monitor app is coming too. The monitor is iOS-only at launch, and reliant on a wired connection I wasn’t able to test myself, lacking the right USB-C to Lightning cable. What did work well was hooking the camera up to an external monitor through a USB-C to HDMI adapter, which gave me a proper live preview without any fuss.

I tried out two lenses across my time with the ILS: a Laowa 7.5mm f/2.0 manual prime that GoPro loaned me alongside the review sample, and my own Panasonic 12-60mm zoom, which doesn’t have manual aperture control. As I had suspected, this made it next to useless on the ILS.

One upside I quickly noticed is that, when paired with that Laowa lens, the ILS focused far closer than the standard Mission 1 Pro ever could. That camera’s minimum focus distance is 60cm, which rules out close-up work entirely. The ILS has no such limit, which opens up macro-style shots that are would be impossible on a fixed-lens GoPro. It’s not enough on its own to win over vloggers, mind you – the lack of autofocus and subject tracking still count heavily against it on that front.

That’s right: automatic subject tracking and horizon lock, both present on the standard Mission 1 Pro, are gone entirely on the ILS due to its use of interchangeable lenses. If you’d rather rely on GoPro’s smarts to keep shots level and framed, you’ll need to look at the fixed-lens models instead.

Audio from the built-in mics is solid without being remarkable. Voices and everyday sound come through clearly, though wind noise gets filtered out of the mix rather than embraced.

Battery life holds up well against GoPro’s claimed figures. The company says the camera will deliver 96 minutes when recording 8K Open Gate at 30fps, or 74 minutes for 16:9 8K at 60fps, and my real-world results were close to both. Thermal management is similarly solid; I only saw overheating warnings when recording at the very top of the spec sheet (50/60fps in 8K or 200/240fps in 4K) and decent airflow around the camera kept that mostly at bay.

As with virtually every GoPro, there’s no built-in storage, so you’ll need to make sure you’ve got a fast V30, Class A2-rated microSD card to hand.

Image Quality

• 8K video up to 60fps in 16:9, or 30fps in Open Gate
• 50MP or 12MP RAW and JPEG stills available
• HyperSmooth stabilisation works even with fully manual lenses

If you can get the camera in focus, the results from that 1-inch sensor are exactly what you’d hope for. I shot most of my test footage with the Laowa prime in 16:9 at 8K/60fps, following GoPro’s own recommended settings for anyone planning to grade footage themselves: GP-Log2, 10-bit colour and the highest bitrate available (240Mbps when using standard firmware). HyperSmooth handled stabilisation well throughout, despite working with a fully manual lens that has no electronic contact with the body at all.

I also tested the Open Gate video (i.e. using the entire surface of the sensor to record), which is one of the features the ILS shares with the standard Mission 1 Pro, but the combination of huge file sizes and a 30fps ceiling made it too restrictive for my usual shooting style. It’s a useful option if you want maximum reframing flexibility in post-production, but I didn’t end up spending much time with it.

Stills are impressive too. I took the ILS out with the Laowa lens and GoPro’s Point-and-Shoot Grip for a photo walk, shooting RAW at 50MP and dropping to 12MP once the light faded. Editing in Adobe Lightroom afterwards, the RAW files gave me far more room to shape the final image than I’m used to from an action camera. The Laowa itself let things down slightly with some softness and a tendency to flare, though that’s down to the lens rather than the camera – pair the ILS with sharper glass and I’d expect cleaner results still.

Low-light performance carries over the step up we already saw on the standard Mission 1 Pro, with that 1-inch sensor a genuine differentiator over GoPro’s Hero Black range. As with any interchangeable-lens setup, though, how far that advantage stretches depends heavily on your choice of glass – a wide-aperture lens will get you noticeably cleaner results after dark.

One thing to note: because the ILS’s sensor is significantly smaller than that of a regular Micro Four Thirds camera, the equivalent focal length is much tighter. For instance, if you mount a 7.5mm Laowa lens on a regular Panasonic MFT camera, its equivalent focal length will be 15mm (as MFT cameras have a 2x crop factor). On the ILS, with its 2.7x crop factor, the equivalent focal length will be just over 20mm.

Should you buy it?

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