All of the company’s setbacks and cutbacks have built to this moment,

One of the only ways to get really good at doing something extreme is to find, and become comfortable with, the limits of that action. To become a world-class snowboarder who hucks corkscrew 1080s 20 feet above a half-pipe made of ice, for example, you’ll inevitably slam into some of that ice along the way.

GoPro started 2018 on the floor of that proverbial half-pipe, bruised and bloody. The company’s stock had flatlined, it had just finished its second year in a row operating at a loss, and GoPro admitted defeat in the drone market by pulling the Karma quadcopter off store shelves. CEO Nick Woodman announced a new round of layoffs — the fourth in the last few years — and started talking publicly about the possibility of an acquisition. He even reportedly hired JPMorgan to suss out the possibility. To top it all off, GoPro’s newest camera, the Hero 6, didn’t sell well enough to help the company meet its own grim prediction for the 2017 holiday season.

Just nine months later, though, there’s a renewed current of optimism running through GoPro’s leadership. The ill-fated Karma drone, the layoffs, and last year’s culling of the company’s bloated camera lineup were all necessary moves, they say, to get GoPro to the exact point it finds itself at now. With any luck, they’ll wind up like those failed half-pipe attempts, and become swiftly forgotten when the company stomps one of its best tricks in years: the new lineup of Hero 7 cameras.

Woodman has spent the last year telling Wall Street, the press, and just about anyone else who will listen that GoPro’s 2018 product announcement would be all about giving customers a Cold Stone Creamery-like choice between three options: “good, better, best.”

That promise materialized in the form of three new cameras that were announced Thursday: the Hero 7 White, Hero 7 Silver, and Hero 7 Black. The cameras are priced at $199, $299, and $399, respectively, and they offer differing levels of performance. And while GoPro has sold some of its best cameras at these price points in years past, the company sometimes had to offer discounts in order to do so. The new lineup was built to be sold at these prices — which is crucial to getting the company to turn a profit again, Woodman told The Verge during a recent interview in his office at GoPro’s headquarters in San Mateo, California.

The Hero 7 Black is the most familiar of the bunch, as it nearly exactly copies the all-black, waterproof, rubbery design of its predecessors (the Hero 5 and Hero 6 Black). It’s the second camera to use GoPro’s custom GP1 processor, which the company first used last year in the Hero 6 Black after splitting with longstanding supplier Ambarella. The extra year spent working with the processor — plus an unspecified extra dash of RAM — has led to a number of new features in the Hero 7 Black, including live-streaming, a slick in-camera time-lapse feature, a Google Pixel-like smart HDR photo mode, and the headliner: a remarkable in-camera digital stabilization algorithm.

The two other cameras, White and Silver, are not as powerful, but they do feature a more refined version of the Hero 5 / Hero 6 design. They almost make the Hero 7 Black look like a near-final prototype; their rounded edges are more round, and their lens bumps are less severe. There’s still a touchscreen on the back of each of these cameras, but GoPro dropped the small LCD display on the front that typically shows information about shooting modes, battery life, and available memory card space.

Internally, they’re powered by a less capable processor — GoPro won’t say who made it just yet — and therefore they have more limited capabilities. The Hero 7 Silver shoots 4K footage, but it doesn’t have super slow-motion capability, for example, while the Hero 7 White’s video resolution tops out at 1080p.

These three (plus the far more niche 360-degree Fusion) are the only cameras GoPro will sell for the foreseeable future and overall, Woodman says, the company is even thinking about simplifying its universe of accessories as well, all in an effort to cut bloated operating costs and reduce customer confusion.

Despite GoPro’s struggles, there’s one truly enviable thing about the position it’s in: it essentially has no direct competition. The company’s biggest competitor in the space was Sony, but the Japanese electronics giant hasn’t put out an action camera in years. Far cheaper options that seem to compete on paper — like Xiaomi’s own Yi lineup — have not been able to put a dent in GoPro’s market share dominance.

The company’s biggest threat, competition-wise, may have always been the rapid evolution of smartphone cameras. But even as those have gotten better, and the phones themselves have become waterproof, there are still plenty of situations where you’d rather let a GoPro take the hit.

Woodman admits the company acted “frightened” over the last few years as it scrambled to understand what it was getting wrong, and that it “retreated a little bit” as a result of all this. But like that snowboarder at the bottom of the half-pipe, Woodman believes GoPro has finally figured out what it’s done wrong. It’s found the limits. Now it’s time to pick itself back up, climb the hill, and try again. If GoPro still needs a hero, its new cameras — and especially its new flagship — may be just the trick.

“It’s far and away the best GoPros we’ve ever made, at far and away the most important time in the company’s history,” he says. “The world loves to tear you down when you’re on top. But fortunately, the world also loves a comeback story.”