GoPro unveiled its latest, impossibly small, impossibly precise, impossibly cool camera on Tuesday evening in San Francisco.

The GoPro Hero 3 gets smaller by 30 percent, faster by a factor of two, and shoots 4K video at 15 frames per second. That's cinema quality in the "black" package for $400. Add built-in Wi-Fi leveraging a GoPro app for your iPhone (Android coming soon), and you can also live-stream your images or video.

Full disclosure: I have been rooting for GoPro since founder Nick Woodman almost rode me off a poison oak-filled cliff along the Northern California coast years ago. It's a Silicon Valley company that has been built on passion, with Woodman leading the charge, and it shows.

GoPro Hero3 WiFi remote. GoPro Hero 3 Wi-Fi remote.

I'll let the real WIRED gadget hounds take it through its paces, but it's insane how much is being packed into such a small package, and how far GoPro as a company has come.

Consider that after the big camera companies ignored the opportunity, this formerly tiny company from Half Moon Bay, California, now has 320 employees, a massive following in the surf, skate, snow, lawnmower riding community – whatever your obsession is. Since 2009 the private company has sold more than 3 million of its cameras. "Nobody had invented the world's most versatile camera, and we were the ones to do it," says Woodman.

That's a boast, but Woodman has a very good point. GoPro has gone beyond surfers and other adrenaline junkies to being a camera that can capture any moment, anywhere. I have seen them deployed in the birth of children, in ambles down Manhattan streets and simple days spent lounging on the beach.

I'll be putting the GoPro 3 to its paces in some seabound adventure in the next 24 hours. Assuming I make it, I'll report back. If nothing else the camera will survive, and there will be plenty of video to comb over.

Photos: Michael V. Copeland/Wired