Bebop Drone + Skycontroller: This product is a tour-de-force of engineering brilliance, watch out DJI. Parrot wins. The software gimbal (take a 180 degree fisheye 4k video and selectively grab an HD section of it) works impressively well. Under very hard maneouvering you see slight blurryness (instead of jerkyness like a mechanical gimbal), under gentle maneuvering as smooth as a gopro on a H3-3D. The software pan/tilt is a too jerky to use while recording (but i love the dedicated thumb joystick to control it without a separate operator), but not by much, i bet future firmware tames this. The image quality is certainly comparable with a gopro but i think gopro might have a slight low light edge. And unlike the gopro, it comes with a lenscap :-). But the whole thing is a stabilized gimbal HD camera that only weighs 400g - and costs and weighs half of what a phantom Vision2+ does. It has brilliant engineering, from the keyed quick mount props that make it impossible to mix CW and CCW props, to the clever easy to replace snap on superlight foam bumpers, to the very intuitive control software. There is so much good engineering in all kinds of design features and product design here than I am seriously impressed. the light weight pays off all kinds of dividends, makes it tougher and harder to break in a crash, makes it use lighter, cheaper, batteries (it even comes with a spare standard), and using software for the gimbal makes it less mechanically complex and dramatically reduces cost and parts count. The Skycontroller give plenty of range, i chickened out because i could no longer see the small 250 sized drone in my range test, a proper one to come, but the surprisingly pleasant ergonomics of the controller, and ease of use of the software with the superlight, supersmooth flying drone, with plenty of power that uses ultrasound and a downward camera to be as stable and responsive indoors and out, pretty much means that anyone considering buying a Phantom should get one of these instead. The video preview is slightly more laggy than a dedicated ntsc/pal transmitter, but its full HD, and overall impressively low lag, including very responsive flight control and rock steady stabilization. Parrot has certainly improved their laggy Achilles heel from their previous drones, impressively responsive now, not quite like a dedicated radio, but still nice to fly. This is my new traveling aerial cam. As I said, Parrot wins. This thing is going to be hard to find in stock because it will be flying off shelves. (pun intended) I have seen the future, and it is software gimbals.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 02:55:30 +0000
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