the Phantom 4 from DJI is BU 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 knck features a
sixth generation cor7 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 it's 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 two
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 document ation 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 firstperson 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 dji's use of a Hardline USB
connection instead of that whole cledy 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 BLS in the Drone Racing League are
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 seen one quadcopter you kind of seen them all
it's got like you guessed it four propellers 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%
Improvement in top speed that's up to 72 km per hour in sport mode with the 5300
Milah 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 maneuver 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 of 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 ever manual
or not manual you want it it behaves smoothly and predictably and the
firsters view is fantastic just fantastic I mean to be
clear I am aware that there are DIY solutions that can handle even 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 propriety 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 a comparison it is really really similar
to the Inspire one based on this fantastic video from Fon RC 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 lowlight performance so
this is 1080 60p 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 DJ on that gamble which leads us pretty well then
into the phantom for touted autonomous
flying modes I have no use personally
for click to fly where you touch the touchcreen 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 oncoming 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 3dr 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's 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 viz 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 L
though fortunately without crashing stop dead in front of a branch that it wasn't
going to hit instead of going around it and not stop 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 4 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 $1,000 lying around I suppose but if you were
shopping for a fancy quadcopter for pleasure or even light professional use
man the lack of an HDMI output on the
controller without a $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
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 packs a lot of fun into its functionality bottom
line this thing spanks I'm going to try
and popularize that that spanks bro so
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video description so thanks for watching guys
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