Gadgetory

like sitting behind the wheel of a race car or staring downrange with a loaded gun in your hands the best drones always give you a little scare a thrill at the power in your grasp I could see that look in the eyes of everyone who flew the new DJI phantom 3 it's a delicious combination of fear and excitement as they realize just how fast this thing can move and then a few seconds later that they weren't going to lose control the DJI phantom has been our favorite model of drones since we started testing these aerial robots at the verge last summer if you were going to glance quickly at this latest model and even give it a quick spin you would find it's nearly indistinguishable from previous incarnations but under the hood it's got a slew of improvements that ensure the best has gotten even better the first thing you'll notice when you fire up the Phantom 3 is how rock-solid it is while hovering take your hand off the controls and it will sit almost completely still even in light wind the video produces looks like it's being shot on a stationary tripod even when you're a thousand feet in the air the positioning system now uses both gps and glonass a Russian satellite network I've had accidents in the past when mid-flight I lost my GPS signal and thus the ability to hold my position compared to my experience with prior phantoms the p3 found more satellites and it found them faster that translated to incredibly stable and reliable flying the camera on the new phantom is also a big upgrade over its predecessors I got a lot of terrific 4k footage while shooting outdoors and varying kinds of light you can easily change your ISO and shutter settings on the fly with the app I did find that the rotors and legs of the drone occasionally intruded into the frame and while you can tilt 90 degrees up and down from shooting straight ahead to directly below I found that tilting the camera sometimes produced a subtle digital distortion in the video in my last drone review I criticized parrots bebop for producing strange stilted footage when panning left and right but the Phantom 3 had the same issue I think this may be a category wide problem all the effort that goes into stabilizing the camera during flight produces an unpleasant artificial look when you're simply panning horizontally fixing it would require building and what people in the film business call easing of course shooting video works best when you can see what you're capturing one of the major technical differences in the new phantom is that DJI built its light bridge digital video downlink directly into the drone this used to be a $1400 accessory but incredibly is now standard on a $1,250 drone the range of my video link varied sometimes I cut out at around 1,200 feet once I was able to get a high-res video stream from my phantom at 4,500 feet about 3/4 of a mile before the signal started to get choppy and cut out the unit still responded to the flight controller without any issues but I never ventured far beyond that to test its maximum range I'm not comfortable flying without a visual in videos posted online phantom threes are shown operating an even streaming video at roughly 3 miles but I never got results that good the battery on the new phantom routinely lasted me 20 minutes or more for charge which is great for drone of this size and price the app also provides a very helpful status bar showing exactly how many minutes of flight time you have left and when you're approaching the point where you won't have enough battery for the automatic return to home feature to function the p3 has one button takeoff and landing both of which worked well you can have it return home to the spot where it took off or have the home point correspond to the controller and thus hopefully the pilot in my testing the Phantom 3 usually landed about 45 feet from the home beacon the autonomous landing is aided by a new feature for the Phantom line a downward facing camera that first appeared on the more expensive DJI inspire 1 this also provides a visual positioning system that can keep the drone stable and flying indoors where satellite signals can't reach while the drone can land itself I found that most often I was just catching it at about eye level and then powering it off to avoid any chance of dust or debris kicked up by the rotors getting into the motors it's a sign of how much I trusted stability that this seemed like the best option I know you're thinking I might end up like Enrique but at least I'm the one controlling the drone being manhandled there were some small issues that came up repeatedly during my testing I found the internal storage and app a little finicky the Phantom 3 comes with a 16 gigabyte microSD card you can view and delete these video files from inside the app but I found that the app was often confused about whether or not a file have been deleted and seemed increasingly unable to free up storage space until I reformatted the SD card completely as with all drones whenever you head to a new location it's a good idea to calibrate the compass with the Phantom 3 this was sometimes a simple process but other times it required me to repeat the ridiculous compass dance several times this may or may not have something to do with the magnet in my finger but I had the same issues even when using the other hand last but not least the Phantom 3 has the ability to livestream video straight to YouTube this works well when you have a great Wi-Fi connection less well over LTE there's always a few second delay between the action in the video but the sync between the audio and the video is strong so it feels live to the audience as a journalist I can think of tons of amazing applications for this new feature although it's less clear how useful it is for the average hob maybe a bird's-eye view of your kids soccer game broadcast live for family across the world to see so yeah the new phantom is awesome it took all the things that were good about the original and improved on them while layering on new hardware and software features that let you do things that simply aren't possible in most consumer drums overall it's combination of price power and ease of use means the Phantom 3 is still far and away the drone I would recommend to anyone looking to get into the Hobby and even to professionals who are on a tight budget