Gadgetory

hey guys what's up Ron for you dear from TechnoBuffalo so a couple weeks back the guys at 3d robotics sent us their new drone the iris plus this runs supposed to have auto piloting features follow me like with GPS tracking it supposed to be crazy so over the last couple weeks we got to fly it test it shoot some footage and so we have our review for you guys today so the first thing I was really interested in personally as the video guy here a TechnoBuffalo was the ease of use and how this would film so I'll kind of separate the two in terms of ease of use it was a little more complicated than I would have liked out of the box setting it up wasn't exactly very straightforward the battery had two or three different cords I really didn't understand why the charger was also like that and plugging the gimbal in which is an additional add-on for the drone that had like the weirdest pin connection it's not a huge deal but it definitely was something that annoyed me a little bit they have awesome tutorials on their website so I would definitely recommend checking those out if you do pick up this drone a make setting up way easier and way faster one of the issues we did have before going out to fly was that the drone actually is GPS the GPS is used to hold the drone in place if there are like crazy winds or something or when you stop operating it'll hold it in one place so you don't lose control or at higher altitudes we didn't have some problems getting GPS lock maybe is because of where we are around office buildings we've also heard people have problems around like a lot of like taller trees and stuff like that so just something to bear in mind that being said once we did get it up in the air it was frickin awesome you do need to start out a little bit slower kind of ease into it so you're not kind of all over the place the controls are very sensitive but once you kind of ease in ease out take off all that stuff with the joysticks it you get the hang of it pretty quickly and it is really really fun oh we did our first flight without a gimbal without the GoPro on it because they say they recommend it for some reason for safety issues as I assume overall I'd say manual operation with this drone was as expected it was great it was smooth the drone is really really powerful there's controls to actually point where the gimbal is facing so once you do have a GoPro on there you can choose where you aim the camera one of the additional add-ons they actually have is GoPro Live View so it allows you to see what the GoPro sees on the remote control itself we personally didn't use this what we did instead it was just used the app available for iOS or Android for GoPro which we love so that was pretty awesome well that pretty much summed up the manual control it was really interesting about what 3d robotics did here with iris plus however as our the autopilot features and the Follow Me feature now I don't know how I felt about this but after using it a couple of times my conclusion is that it's a really cool feature but it's more of a novelty from a filmmaking and video aspect rather than it is actually a professional tool it's kind of like autofocus and cameras it works and eventually you'll get focus but you can't really use it for filming purposes and the reason I say this is because the follow me feature works perfectly you know we had a tablet and we had follow me and if we'd walk around it would follow us in the gimbal with tracks and that sort of stuff but the thing we noticed was with it it's a bit jarring like the the drone will fly the camera will be a just a little fly readjust fly readjust and so for any of you who do video making you know that that's really not an ideal situation you want your camera moves to be smooth fluid which there really weren't so again it definitely works on paper but it doesn't work in the most executional of ways the autopilot features were pretty similar they worked really well with the tablet you can set an unlimited amount of points of where you want the joint of fly the altitude you want to fly at which is really cool if you personally feel a little sketchy about controlling the drone yourself it'll even land itself which is a great safety precaution but again for filming purposes it doesn't really work that well it's still too jarring to really use for regular footage one of the oddities is actually at the app for the autopilot and the follow me functions is only available for Android so we did you have to use an Android tablet for this but it is not available for iOS devices something to bear in mind if you are planning on picking up this drone another weird quirk was actually the battery door in the back this whole thing is made of plastic but the battery door on the back was pretty difficult to close because the battery has some thicker cord so you kind of have to jam it all in there and just like snap it shut which sometimes feels like you might almost break it but you just got to be careful with that that was something I thought could have been better in terms of build quality in terms of price in the iris plus stars at 750 dollars now that might seem really cheap compared to DJI phantom 3 or something but it's actually not they actually match up pretty well in terms of pricing because you do have to buy your own GoPro the DJI comes with its own camera and you also have to add on the gimbal just the drone in the gimbal alone add up to 950 dollars so you're hovering about the same price range so final thoughts I think this dorms really cool I mean we had a great time with it it's a really fun device now if you just want to draw in a flyer on and mess around with this is amazing if you're using for filming or video purposes it's really good but drones are in their infancy as we see them right now so they will improve auto piloting will get better the follow me feature will get better with newer versions of this drone right now I don't think the autopilot features are good enough to use them on a professional filming level but they're certainly a fun novelty to have if you do manual operation you get really good at it I could see you getting some really good footage out of this drone you know coupled with the GoPro 4 like we had for example in 4k its overall really fun it comes in at a really good price point so we're definitely fans over here that's it for this video guys let us know what you thought what do you guys think of this drone would you pick it up or would you go with something like the Phantom 3 why or why not leave us a comment below give us a thumbs up if you liked the video and hit the big subscribe button right here for more tech videos