Finally, the rear of the controller features two customizable buttons , and a power port. The DJI Phantom 4 is a compact, high quality quadrotor camera drone that can easily be carried from one location to the next for every project. With a flight time of 28 minutes per battery and a flight speed of up to 45mph, the Phantom 4 covers a large area in a short time period, significantly saving time and resources.
The battery features a set of lights that indicate the amount of charge left, giving a handy visual guide to flight times. Once the drone is assembled and your mobile device is connected the controller can be switched on, followed by the Phantom 4. It’s then just a case of waiting for 6 GPS satellites to be picked up before you take to the air.
If it fails to regain connection, it will also revert to straight line RTH. The Phantom 4 camera has been improved in terms of image quality. Chromatic aberration has been reduced by 56% and lens distortion had been reduced by 36% compared to Phantom 3 Professional. We will spare you every detail, but in a nutshell, DJI has attempted to account for everything that could possibly go wrong during flight and has a protocol in place to handle it.
The 60fps speed makes P4P+ V2.0 video an ideal candidate for conversion to slow motion. The output is increased to 100Mbs from 60Mbs on most earlier Phantom 4 models. This is true professional-level video that’s suitable for shooting TV news, commercials, features, advanced web pages, weddings and indoor/outdoor events. P-Mode allows your quadcopter to use visual positioning and obstacle sensing. It is also the position you need to be in to use all the intelligent flight modes such as Waypoints, ActiveTrack, TapFly and beginner mode etc. S-mode adjusts the handling for maximum maneuverability and unlocks the drone’s top flight speed of 45mph.
It’s a modest improvement from the , which is rated for 28 minutes and netted about 23 minutes of flight time in our tests. TapFly, which lets you move the Phantom to a point in space by tapping on it in the Live View feed, is joined by Draw. Draw works in a similar manner, but lets you draw a flight path on your screen. The drone will fly along the path, avoiding obstacles using its forward and rear sensors along the way. The drone also has a Sport mode, which increases the maximum speed to 45mph, but absolutely no obstacle detection is enabled. It can go faster with help from the wind—the app told me that my Phantom 4 Pro was flying around 50mph in Sport mode for a good stretch of distance during one of my test flights.
Considering the class of drone here, there is a good amount of competition out there. We do not consider the Mavic Pro, Spark or other smaller folding drones to be competition. To us, competition comes in the form of larger drones that have, if nothing else, a hanging camera setup.
It works pretty well, as long as your subject isn’t too small and doesn’t blend into the background. I was able to get it to follow me around with no problems when I wore a tan coat while standing on a green athletic field. But when our family dog moved from grass to a fallow field that was close to his coloring, the Phantom lost track of his movements. The Pro ships with a big, comfortable remote control. The left stick controls the altitude and spins the aircraft about its axis.
In cases where you need a lot of images, and a high overlap, this difference adds up. The best way to evaluate the price is to consider the average size of your projects and how many man-hours are spent shooting ground control. If you work on sites larger than 20-acres then the time savings from shooting fewer ground control points is very real and can quickly offset the increased cost of the dji drones RTK. For a non-RTK bird, the amount of ground control required for a job is a function of the height you fly at and the size of your site. About 5 GCPs per flight battery is a good metric to use for non-RTK. In our case the 60m flight proved the most usable as it had the right balance between image sizes, interpolation and flying height.