Head out into any trail centre and one thing you’re bound to see is a GoPro sticking off the top of a helmet or three. In just a few years the compact camera, with its wide range of mounts and full HD video recording, has become the must-have camera for filming your riding and racing. You only need to do a Google search, which returns 41 million results, to see how popular the GoPro is.

Not wanting to rest on their laurels, GoPro have given the GoPro Hero3+ a significant update. The headline grabbing news is the 30% smaller and lighter case, which is still waterproof (though only up to 40m, but that’s more than plenty of typical winter mountain biking) and a claimed 20% increase in battery life.

The Hero3+ is available in two versions, the £359.99 Black Edition and £279.99 Silver Edition. They’re largely very similar, both with the new smaller case and improved battery life, but the Black gets quite a few more interesting updates. Inside the camera there is a new sharper lens for even better clarity. The SuperView mode is even wider than previously so you can capture more of the trail. Mountain biking often sees you diving in out and out of the trees, and here a new Auto Low Light mode, which dynamically adjusts the frame rate to better deal with rapidly changing light levels, should help. The WiFi has been updated too and is claimed to be 4x faster, and the audio mic has been improved.

The Silver Edition has been given a 2x faster image processor over its predecessor and also boasts the improved WiFi capability.

GoPro already has a decent range of mounts, which is largely attributable to its huge success, there’s almost no limit to mounting options, which has resulted in some pretty insane video work. The new QuickClip and Jaws Flex Clamp open up a new range of possibilities, and children can also benefit from the excellent chest mount now too.

Both cameras are available now from Madison, click here for more.