DJi Mini 2 Drone Demonstration and Review | 4K

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the DJI Mini 2 drone
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which has been a great addition to my personal kit. I've been wanting to get a drone for a while
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just wanting to give the additional perspective that can come from a drone
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But obviously, you know, there's a lot of options out there. And the original Mini, when it came out, I love the form factor, but I really did want 4K
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And so I can match the footage quality to the rest of what I do on my channel. And so when the Mini 2 came out, sporting the ability to have 4K recording
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I knew that it was something that I was seriously interested in and took a plunge with
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Now, and today's review is going to be a little bit different because really, I mean, to me, this is more about the footage
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And I suspect that's what you want to see. And so I'm going to voice over, but just give you a look at a lot of different footage that I've taken over the last couple of months
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that I've been reviewing and getting familiar with this. So as noted, there are a number of key upgrades that come from the Mini, which was already a really well-received drone, to the Mini 2
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First of all, as already noted, we get an upgrade to 4K video
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And the footage looks really, really great. I'm really thrilled with the performance for video capture
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We'll talk more about sensor performance in just a couple of minutes. Another key upgrade for someone like myself is that you have the ability to capture raw stills
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which obviously if you want to do any kind of editing at all to images, having raw is key for that
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Now also noted as an upgrade is the upgrade to it being quieter as far as the motor transmission
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but don't let that oversell you. It still sounds like the world's largest, angriest hornet if you're anywhere near it
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Another upgrade however is that we've gone from a Wi-Fi transmission to the
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upgraded OcuSync 2.0 and so that allows you to have control of it in ideal
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conditions up to 10 kilometers or a six mile range which is really really
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incredible. Likewise it can fly up to heights of 2.5 miles that's over four
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kilometers which is really really impressive. It's also very fast you can
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in the sport mode you can go up to 36 miles an hour which is right under 60 kilometers an hour
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so it can move incredibly quickly in sport mode it slows down to about 22 miles per hour if you're
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flying in normal mode which is still in my experience plenty fast in most situations
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and then you can also choose to go into the cine mode where it's 12 miles per hour
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which allows you to get smoother the big smoother footage the biggest thing being in
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particularly if you're banking and making turns, you're going to allow a little bit more resolution
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by eliminating a little bit of the speed out of the movement. It can now also sustain itself in
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winds of up to between 19 to 24 miles per hour, or that's 38 kilometers on the high end
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And the flight time has been extended from 30 minutes to 31 minutes of fly time. And so some
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impressive upgrades that already made a good drone to now be a really, really competent drone
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with just a few things that are still missing that you might miss and might be worthy considering
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of upgrading to a higher-end model. We'll touch on those in just a moment. First of all, however
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we're going to interrupt the footage and we're going to go a little bit closer on and take a
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look at the drone itself and some of the basic functions and features there. Let's take a closer
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look. So one of the hallmarks of the mini-series has obviously been how incredibly compact it is
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and that certainly cannot be overstated. If you are, like myself, started off with the Phantom
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series, this is downright tiny by comparison. It also comes with a few logical places of
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you know, keeping things protected while you travel. So, you know, first of all
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covering up the various rotors, which it does effectively, and then a secondary cover that
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covers up the camera and, you know, it's obviously probably somewhat fragile
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gimbal mechanism there. Which, by the way, I do have to say that the gimbal mechanism
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is just amazing to me on this. Just knowing how complex gimbals can be
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the fact of how stable this is in movement in a variety of weather conditions is truly impressive to me So a couple of stages that come into getting this ready for action you first fold out the top to
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we'll call them wings, out, straight out, and then the bottom to rotate forward. And so you end up
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with this profile that it doesn't, it used to be there was on the Phantom
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there's these big prongs to keep it off the ground. However, it's helped a lot
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that it has the automated landing system that makes sure that you're coming down gently
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You have a weight of only 249 grams. That is only 8.8 ounces
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And so this is obviously incredibly light. But I will point out that it is
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It doesn't feel cheap at the same time. It feels like it's fairly sturdy, and as you can see, I've got a little bit of marking on mine
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That's actually the byproduct of I had landed on a gravel driveway, really coarse gravel
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and actually a large, probably 80 or 90-pound dog was coming over very excited
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and came and stomped on it and mashed it down, and literally that is all the damage that was done
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as I got a little bit of a scrape on the finish. But so far, it's proven to be quite durable, and so kudos to them on that
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You know, the finish actually reminds me a bit of some of Canon's L-series lenses
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It's kind of the same color, and just there's a light flocking there that reminds me of that
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even though everything here is probably certainly engineered plastics. Now, what you have at the back is a couple of ports, USB-C
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which theoretically could be used for a few purposes. These days, it's very easy to do your firmware updates
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just by using the app, which is fantastic. You also have your card slot here
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and so it's a micro SD. I've got a 64 gig card
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which seems to be plenty, even with fairly extensive usage. And then there is a port here
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that covers where the battery, the flight battery is. The flight batteries are pretty good sized
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all things considered, and they're rated for up to around a 31 minute flight time
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Now, I actually purchased this in a kit called the Fly More Kit
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And so the Fly More Kit, first of all, it comes with the nice nylon bag
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It does come with a number of accessories, extra rotors, and things like that
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A few tools for helping with, you know, if you do have some wear and tear
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some damage to things along the way. You do get a couple of extra knobs for the controller as well, and a nice logical place to carry everything
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But probably the headline thing here is that you have not only two additional batteries
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but you have this charger that will charge in sequence. It doesn't charge them all simultaneously, but it will sequence charge three batteries
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and so you can not have to think about it very much. USB-C is the primary way that you can connect in, but there is also output. You can draw some off
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the batteries themselves, maybe if you're wanting to charge a controller in a desperate situation
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So another thing that has changed is the controller itself, which now has a larger
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some people may not necessarily love that, but it's also a much more versatile charger. And so
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I don't actually mind it. It's still, the whole package is still compact and easy to bring along
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And so there is a place here where you can actually get the knobs
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It's not to say you can't use this without the knobs, but it certainly is easier with them in place
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And so, you know, but for storage, you might want to keep them in there because it just helps there to be less vulnerability and a nice flat profile here
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So a few things that I like about this is that, first of all, it allows you to get a lot of your controls in a really logical, easy to access way
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that is actually simpler than using them on the phone app. So that includes ability to switch between sources, video or photo
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to take photos or video with one click. I really like the knob here that allows you to control the tilt of the camera
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whether you're going to look up or down. And so that is useful. You have a return to home button here
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and then you can switch between the different modes. Now, the also primary thing that's going to happen here
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is this is where you're going to connect in your phone and so that you have monitoring of the actual drone itself
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Now, there are some other cables that are included that you have in the kit
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but if you're shooting iOS, your cable is already in here. I want to point that out
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because I looked for it for a while. This sits in here so nice and flushed
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I wasn't really thinking that it was a cable because the flow was so good
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But anyway, that is the cable that you're going to want to connect into iOS. And if you're shooting Android, there is going to be a subsequent cable there or USB
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you know, something has USB-C, et cetera, et cetera. So once you have your phone connected obviously that screen becomes incredibly important And I find that much truer with the mini mini One thing you quickly pick up going from the larger Phantom to something this size
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is that at even a moderate height, the small profile and the light color makes this completely disappear
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There's been plenty of times that I could hear it and I could not see it. So you become really reliant on the actual image coming off of the camera to help to bring it home
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And of course, you know, the return to home is incredibly important. Now, the downside of being so heavily GPS oriented is that you just, you tend to run
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into a lot of restrictions. It seems like Harley, no matter where you try to fly, that, you know, there's some kind
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of restriction and you're having to answer questions and take responsibility and do this
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and do that. And so it's a bit of a pain, frankly. And so obviously they're trying to protect themselves and there's a lot of controls that
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are built in. But I would say, you know, probably my primary frustrations have come with that integration and just being overzealous when it comes to that, even if you're not flying in any kind of risky fashion or any kind of legitimately protected area
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And so very quickly, once you're connected up, you see what it sees. And obviously I'm not going
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to take off here at the moment at my work table, but it gives you an idea that the camera is already
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live and ready to go. And so obviously that helps a lot. And so you can, as I said, you can rotate
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up and down right there. But anyway, having, being able to see what it sees is obviously going to be
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really crucial to your flight. So all in all, the execution of the pieces here is really excellent
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we'll move on to talk about flying it, using it, and the image quality you're getting off of
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the little camera. So overall, I'm impressed by the build quality despite, you know, there being
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being so lightweight under 250 grams, which of course it's that allows it to not have to be
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registered in certain jurisdictions with, you know, some kind of flight agency. And so it gives you a
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little bit more flexibility in that regard. As I noted, it also does have an upgraded camera here
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which 4k footage as we've already seen a lot of but then also the ability to capture raw
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and something that i can do a little bit more uniquely that maybe not every drone review will
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cover is an actual mini review of the camera itself so we're going to jump and take a look
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at image quality here so one of the key updates to the mini 2 from the mini 1 was that you now
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have the option to record in raw which is obviously something very important to those of us that are a
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little bit more invested in image quality. And so you have the option of recording in either a 4.3
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or a 16.9. I would recommend go ahead and recording in 4.3 for the simple reason that
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as you can see, our dimensions are 4,000 by 3,000. If you shoot in 16.9, it's 4,000 by 2250. So all
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it's doing is just cropping off the top and the bottom. Whereas in this case, I can do that 16.9
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crop later on and I have a little bit more option on where I want to crop to get maximum composition
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out of this which I have done here and so I think that I it's worth shooting in 4.3 unless you want
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to just directly grab images really quick and throw them into you know footage in some way go
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ahead and shoot in 4.3 and gives yourself a little more flexibility. Now you can see that the camera
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is rated at four and a half millimeters but as you can see the angle of view that I mark awesome
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to is actually reflected here and it's a little over 20 millimeters and that seems about right
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that's where i guessed it and you've got a maximum aperture of f 2.8 here you don't really have
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aperture control however so i mean it's kind of a fixed aperture take it with a grain of salt in
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that sense now as far as the actual image quality goes depending on different settings you know it's
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it's not as versatile a lens as what I'm accustomed to in SLRs or mirrorless bodies
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but we've got a pretty nice amount of resolution. However, what's here can definitely use some
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sharpening if you're looking at it just raw right out of camera, basically. Contrast is a little bit
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low, I think, and definitely there's some room for sharpening. Let's take a look at what I've done
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So in the image on the right, obviously I've done a bit of processing, I've added in some contrast to it, and I've added in some sharpening
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So as a byproduct, as you can see, there's just a lot of additional appearance of detail, mostly due to improving the contrast and adding a little bit of sharpening so that you can see those details kind of stand out a little bit better
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So what you can see is that I have mostly boosted contrast by raising the white value and dropping the black point value to build the histogram a little bit more favorably
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As far as sharpening goes, I have added in a plus 80. I've got a radius of 7 and a detail at 48 and a bit of masking at 9
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And after playing around, that was the settings that I liked. Now, in this case, there is no automatic profile
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for this particular camera as of yet However I find that if you go to enable profile corrections and you choose DJI it goes with the Inspire one And as far as the distortion goes it seems to correct fairly well
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And so that works for me at the moment. So on a 4K monitor like this, if I go full screen
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I am basically pretty much already at a pixel level. And so what you see is what you get
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but detail looks fairly good and obviously you can get some incredible angles of view
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that are unique to the way you can look at other images, but there's not going to be a whole lot
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of additional cropping room there, latitude there, if you want to display on a higher resolution
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display. At the same time, however, I don't want to fault it too much because I think that images
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look fairly good. The one major vulnerability that I've seen is when it comes to flare resistance
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and as you can see, this lens does not like bright lights pointed at it, and so you do have to, you know, exercise some caution
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and you're going to see a real difference in the contrast you get relative to how a bright light like the sun is in the frame
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So as you can see, I mean, there's certainly limitations still there. It's not going to replace a, you know, a high-end mirrorless or DSLR
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but at the same time, it's very impressive the kind of footage you can get, and of course, for me, the biggest thing is you can get such a unique
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perspective from a camera like this, whether it be video or stills footage. It's just unmatched by
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anything else that you might do. So what's missing? The biggest thing that I would love to see added
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to this in a future drone model would be to have some kind of obstacle avoidance. It's a little bit
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nerve-wracking knowing that, you know, it's such a small drone and around here I'm flying over a lot
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of very tall trees. And so there's been a few times that the camera perspective is maybe
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you know, all of a sudden my heart, you start racing because I feel like I'm just about to
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clip into something. And because of the range, it may be flying so far away from me that I would
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have a hard time locating it if it dropped down. And so obstacle avoidance obviously takes a lot of
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the guesswork out of that and gives you a little bit more peace of mind. So that's something if
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you're you know very serious about that you might want to look at a higher end model and beyond that
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you know I certainly would like to see that as an upgrade for the future another thing is compared
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to the higher end models that you do have less kind of custom shots and so in terms of of tracking
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you do have a variety of things you can go into the app to do where you can do like short-term
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tracking and boomerang and some other kind of setup shots you know circling around an object
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All of those things obviously are great, but if you really want something like sport tracking
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you're going to have to look at higher-end models because this is not a drone that's designed for you to get on your bike, for example
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and for it to track you over a series of kilometers. It's one thing to do a few brief clips, but not something that's going to work for the long term
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But at the end of the day, for a price point of $449 US, this is a lot of drone
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And if you want the Fly More packet that I purchased myself and that I've demonstrated here, it's going to run you at $595 US, so right under $600
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But you are getting pretty good value in that upgrade, most notably the additional batteries
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But then also, I mean, invariably, you're going to have to replace some propellers along the way
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So having some backups of that and having the nice travel bag and charger, all of those things are obviously very useful
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So it's pretty good value for money if you want to spend that extra bit. But at the end of the day, I'm really delighted with it
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For the kind of needs I have, the really only thing that I'm missing is the obstacle avoidance
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And so I'm just taking a little bit more cautious in some of the shots that I'm getting
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and making sure I'm leaving enough room for clearance as a part of them. But beyond that, I mean, there's just a lot going on
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The only thing that I don't love relative to the early drones is that we've made so much progress
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as far as GPS and assistance in flying, which is great. Don't get me wrong
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but it also means that there are so many electronic nannies now at this point that kind of limit how
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you fly, where you fly, and, you know, making you jump through a lot of hoops in terms of
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answering questions and in situations where it's just overkill. I mean, I'm not doing any kind of
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risky behavior here. And so, you know, I just find that it's, it's a little bit intrusive in that
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regard. You know, that's part of connectivity, I guess. But at the end of the day, I'm really
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delighted. It's a great addition. It's so portable, so easy to bring along, and it produces some pretty
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amazing footage. So well worth considering if you're in the market for a compact drone. I'm
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Dustin Abbott. If you look in the description down below, there are links there if you want to explore further and would like to purchase one for yourself. Also, a link is to follow me on social
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media to become a patron or to sign up for my newsletter that comes out every Thursday. And of
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course, if you haven't already, please click that subscribe button right here on YouTube. Almost
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100,000 subscribers, which I'm delighted to get to that metric. And make sure to also click to
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receive notifications when new content drops. As always, thanks for watching today. Have a great day
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and let the light in

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