DJI the maker of the Phantom drone has answered GoPro back with a direct competitor to the Karma drone announced last week. The new DJI Mavic Pro drone is extremely portable; even more so than the Karma and has obstacle avoidance technology along with ground awareness which is missing from the GoPro completely. It also has the follow me feature in more modes than ever which makes shooting with it a breeze.
There was probably no other camera out there with more expectations to raise the high frame rates threshold than the GoPro Hero 5 Black. Disappointingly they stayed the same as what we had in the Hero 4 Black of last year. However there is a lot to like in the new update and the Karma Drone might be the real upgrade for the camera line by using a handheld stabilizer that works in your hand and in the air within the same bundle.
The Hero 4 Black and Silver are still relevant and usable in the new Karma drone with no adjustments. It is good of GoPro to still support their camera line but it is hard to fathom why the GoPro 3 Black and 3+ are not supported since they basically are very close in shape and design to the Hero 4. It may be time for some creative people to come with a way to use these cameras in the drone.
We are just a couple of months away from Photokina 2016 which takes place from Sept 20-25th in Cologne Germany. There are quite a few refresh expectations when it comes to cameras but there are also rumors of new announcements. As to what is solid and or dependable remains a mystery but rest assured there will be some good hardware presented.
For starters the updates to popular higher end camera lines in the Nikon, Canon, Sony and Panasonic lines should be announced with most of them sporting higher frame rates as specs. Continuous Phase Auto focus will continue to be a trend this year as more sensors support it.
The Drone market has started to heat up when it comes to professional features in the mid range pricing space. The Phantom 4 by DJI showed us that collision avoidance and obstacle awareness as a built in feature can stay within the realm of fairly priced drones.
Now the Typhoon H Drone by Yuneec an established electric aviation company with it’s 4k camera capable of slow motion 120fps at 1080p which is competitive with DJI’s is trying to compete head to head with some great technologies that the Phantom does not offer like a 6 rotor design that gives redundancy if one of the propellers should fail mid flight.
Aalborg University’s Drone Research Lab based in Denmark has tested a catapult contraption with a Drone rotor and propeller against pig flesh. The results seem to be as you would expect even before you attempt the experiment. A given hypothesis is that a high speed propeller can cause some damage to skin or flesh as any sharp object would.
It is interesting as an experiment but there seems to be a lot of negative press about this from several news and tabloid sources. Drones get a bad rap and continue to be a favorite of regulation advocates for privacy and security. There will be more experiments made with larger and diverse drones as time progresses.
The DJI Phantom 4 quad copter drone has started shipping in some parts of the world and we now have a few samples of what the slow motion 1080p 120fps mode looks like. At first glance it looks to be ok with few artifacts controlled aliasing and moire and while compression seems severe, it is above 720p pixel quality which is encouraging.
There is an inherent softness as with many other 120fps modes used in similar action cameras like the GoPro Hero 4 or Sony Action Cam which spread the bit-rate of their maximum throughput and dice it to 120fps in the case of full HD.