I have been searching for a replacement for an uncomfortable amount of time before coming across these Samson MFG mounts and quite honestly I feel like they were definitely worth the wait. As a fairly new shooter exploring my strengths and weaknesses in new arenas I thought it would be a helpful training tool to be able to study my shooting habits. I originally tried 2 other mounts off of ebay but I found them mediocre and unreliable at best because one of them would come lose while shooting and the other was just to flimsy to maintain a good angle while in use it would walk off to where I could barely even see myself in the screen. Needless to say they both went to much lower recoil weapons after my first range day of using the Samson mount.
One of the largest mistakes I had seen with the cheap-o ebay mounts is the GoPro mount itself would be plastic and have a very lose tolerance giving it a subpar mounting surface. Which naturally led to my issues however, the Samson GoPro Direct Mount was all aluminum and had very tight tolerances I actually had to wiggle it a bit to line the bolts up between the mount and my GoPro Hero 5. Once tightened to where I felt comfortable I experienced something I could not with the cheap-o mounts, a sense of security knowing it was solid and would not drop my $300 GoPro. So, I proceeded into doing some dryfire drills to get myself adjusted to it and believe it or not if you like running a balanced weapon it will throw you off a bit because of the addition weight to one side but it is very temporary and the benefits are worth it. After about 45 minutes of dryfire practice and some magazine changes and a few target acquisitions the learning curve was complete for me so I left my GoPro mounted to my rifle and plugged it in to charge for the following day on the range.
This mount helped facilitate some amazing training for me because it caught my every movement on film and allowed me to do a play by play analysis of my skills while on the range. That is such an amazing lifehack for shooters that are in the beginner-intermediate stage of shooting and I have to say this is the perfect mount to do it with. No matter how hard I was on it while on my AR-15 it did not budge one single time it stayed tight and at the exact filming angle I set it to as it should. Although, I did exercise some precaution as it was a $300 GoPro so I didn’t bang it around to much but my movements and transitions were rough enough to get the point across. I even took it up a notch as I am also into long range precision shooting as well and mounted it on my .308 bolt gun and the recoil did not phase it one bit the Samson mount had definitely won my respect at this point. Highly recommend it for long range precision shooters after going that route also you can see your every movement and you can line up footage time with targets to see where you can improve.
So, whether you use it as a training tool as I did in order to help focus on trigger pull, position, magazine changes, etc. or if you just want to use it to get some awesome range footage I am very confident this Samson GoPro mount will not let you down. I would say if you are passionate about getting faster and better then go pick up a GoPro and a Samson Direct GoPro Mount and put in some work on the range. Once the skills are honed to your liking then switch the GoPro around and make some awesome videos and show off your hard work to the world. These mounts have a MSRP of just $49.11 I believe that is a great price considering I have paid the same for cheap-o ebay mounts and received much less stability and quality it is good to see someone finally got it right. These mounts are available in both Keymod and M-LOK currently so go check them out. You can also read my original article here.