Gadgetory

The Phantom 4 from DJI is by a longshot the best flying vehicle I have ever had the pleasure of using and I'll spend the next seven or so minutes telling you why intel skull canyon nook features a 6th generation Core i7 quad-core processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more at the link in the video description right out of the box the Phantom 4 impressed me it's small its light thanks to the magnesium chassis and the packaging can actually be reused as a really robust carrying case it'll hold the quad a metric wack ton of spare propellers the controller and either 2 batteries or a battery and a charger that's pretty much all that a recreational user will need although there's still room for accessories like hard cases and backpacks for the pros the setup process is fairly easy thanks to the documentation but still a little tedious so after charging the batteries it took about 20 minutes of you know how do I turn this on it's a quick press followed by a long press by the way screwing on the pill bottle style locking propellers running around looking for a lightning cable I used an iPhone 6s for this review by the way updating the firmware and figuring out where to put a micro SD card only to realize that a 16 gig one is included out of the box bonus I did my first latency test of the first-person view camera feed and it is hard to say how much of this is generational improvements I mean my solo is just about a year old now and how much of it is DJ eyes use of a hardline USB connection instead of that whole clergy connect to a Wi-Fi access point here that connects wirelessly to the drone relay but wow this is head and shoulders better than anything I've used before I mean it's not like twitch reflex high speed flying capable gear like those blokes in the drone racing league you're using but it is certainly responsive enough to not be an excuse for a photographer or a videographer to miss a shot at least when it's sitting in the entryway of my house literally one meter away from the controller more on that later now some folks can go on and on about how sexy the Phantom 4 is but drones don't really turn my crank and I feel like if you see one quadcopter you kind of seen them all it's got like you guessed it four yay so it's the underlying tech that gets me excited here and let's get it up in the air while we discuss the motors have been upgraded for about a 20 percent improvement in top speed that's up to 72 km/h in sport mode with the 5300 milliamp hour lipo battery rated at a maximum of 28 minutes though this assumes a very steady flight and optimal conditions not being a drone ace I personally didn't find much reason to whip around that fast but there is more to the improved motors than just I want to go faster and in the normal P mode the most impressive thing to me about the Phantom 4 is its stability in the air P or position mode uses a combination of GPS downward facing cameras ultrasonic emitters their new inertial measurement unit and these upgraded motors to achieve something I just hadn't seen yet nearly perfect hovering and shockingly fast self-correction during small gusts of wind or when the user suddenly lets go of the sticks in the middle of a new ver and it needs to compensate to get back to a hover it's so confidence inspiring to see it behave so predictably in the air that I was actually willing to let my four-year-old son help me fly it in my lap something I wouldn't have even considered with any other drone that I have touched some of which theoretically hover when you let go but in practice require a fair bit more user intervention than that which doesn't mean it flies itself if you don't want it to purists can switch to the less helpful attitude mode which turns off the GPS system and lets you bank and drift through corners much more naturally I mean I think the bottom line about the Phantom 4 is that flying it is just such a pleasure however manual or not manual you want it it behaves smoothly and predictably and the first-person view is fantastic just fantastic I mean to be clear I am aware that there are DIY solutions that can handle lower latency and longer range but to say I was blown away when I flew for 20 minutes around the corner of a building and up to a kilometer away which is as far as I can go maintaining line-of-sight with my binoculars anyway without so much as a compression artifact on the video feed would be an understatement again the 3dr solo also a very good drone went a similar distance but not in a confidence-inspiring manner I mean it would glitch out here and there and the video feed was anything but HD by that distance which leads us pretty well then into the camera it is great I was quite critical of DJI initially for moving to their own proprietary camera system instead of collaborating with a market leader like GoPro except whether they saw this coming or it was just a lucky guess GoPro has sat on their ass and done absolutely nothing noteworthy in the last year and a half while DJI has been innovating so the camera is slightly sharper than the phantom 3 professional and while I lack one personally for comparison it is really really similar to the inspire one based on this fantastic video from fall Canarsie hobby and the gimbal actually has an added support link as well for better stability the 120 FPS 1080 recording mode was quite disappointing and I'll let you be the judge of its low-light performance so this is 1080 60 P footage as we were approaching dusk on an otherwise sunny and beautiful day but my overall takeaway here is that the footage is professional-grade stable and looks amazing what a payoff for DJI on that gamble which leads us pretty well then into the phantom force touted autonomous flying modes I have no use personally for click to fly where you touch the touchscreen and it goes where you touched I can operate control sticks but the object tracking mode that I'm using on my bike here is freaking sick you drag a box around the object you want to track and the Phantom 4 follows it using its front mounted cameras to either avoid coming obstacles or go around them and under carefully controlled conditions it's amazing it actually uses the visual tracking rather than a link to the remote control unit the way most of these solutions work yet it actually managed to produce more usable footage of a moving subject running around below it than my three are solo with that said though it has a long way to go before I will trust it in the way that I do the Phantom 4 is other features a quick moving subject can easily shake off the drone and from my experience taking my bike for a very sweaty stressful ride around the neighborhood even under what I would consider to be pretty ideal conditions with a high vis yellow object to track the altitude and the following distance of the drone was all over the place it lost me twice while maneuvering slowly and the collision avoidance system managed to scrape a street lamp but fortunately without crashing stop dead in front of a branch that it wasn't going to hit instead of going around it and not stopped itself as I crept towards fairly dense foliage pulling into my driveway it works sometimes but it's not a mode that I would actually use unless I had the kind of income that would make buying a new phantom for basically inconsequential which leads us then to the conclusion here because the Phantom 4 is not cheap is it worth the money well not if you don't have a thousand dollars lying around I suppose but if you were shopping for a fancy quadcopter for pleasure or even light professional use then the lack of an HDMI output on the controller without $100 add-on module and some tinkering is a bummer but I can't criticize much else about it it's not as much of a blast to rip around in the park as a fully manual even a fixed-wing quite frankly and it feels more like a tool to use than a toy to go out and play with but that doesn't mean that it's boring and combined with some creativity the Phantom 4 really that's a lot of fun into its functionality bottom line this thing spanks I'm going to try and popularize that that's banks bro so here's some good news mass drop you might know them from such deals as deals on knives deals on camping supplies deals on keyboards or deals on audio gear the way the mass drop works is they find authorized resellers or manufacturers and they say hey we've got this huge community of enthusiasts if you drop your price we can get a bunch of people to buy and then they go to the enthusiast they say hey if a bunch you guys commit to buy we can get them to drop their price and they've recently branched out into exclusive products as well so they're actually working with HiFi man to bring back their 8300 headphones with a special nd or mass drop edition twist so at the beginning solely under the hi-fi man brand these entry-level can you really call them that headphones were priced at 300 US dollars so the new 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