DJI FPV Drone Long Term Review | I Finally Understand It!

[Music] one of the things i like to do on this channel is talk about products long term and the dji fpv drone is no different it's been out for now eight months and i wanted to share my experience after owning this and crashing it and breaking it and traveling with it all across the country let's get started [Music] [Music] wherever you know i follow [Music] [Applause] what's good everybody ken here you're watching original dobo and today we're talking about the dji fpv drone long term this drone has now been out for eight months time and it's recently gotten a price reduction of about a hundred bucks depending on what retailer you go through and it made me start thinking it'd be a good time to talk about this right before the holiday season as to whether or not this is still a good purchase today because i know a lot of people are probably considering this and i want to give you the good the bad the ugly um with this quad because the this is probably i would say the most complicated release that dji has had as far as what is this actually for and i know that this drone receives an immense amount of hate especially from the fpv community but i think that's primarily because it is misunderstood when i first got this drone in hand i misunderstood the purpose so let's just go ahead and jump into this and let's start off with the elephant in the room which is build quality alrighty so i would be lying to you if i said that this was the most durable drone that i've ever seen it's definitely not and if we're just being completely honest i think dji screwed up when they made this drone because they made it out of an uh some sort of plastic they say it's a carbon-infused plastic but if we just cut the and call it for what it is this is a plastic drone through and true and because it's plastic it's going to be subjected to certain wear and tear that you wouldn't get from let's say a carbon fiber drone that you would build yourself in my experience with this i have now gone through two of these this is the third drone so hopefully third time is a charm but i've gone through two and the first wreck that i had with this was i wouldn't say it was a huge rack i i smashed into a fence and when i smashed into the fence it broke these feet off and it broke the gimbal it wasn't a hard hard crash but it was it was enough to break the drone you know and break the landing gear which yes i probably could have fixed but i just wanted to see what it would cost me to send this out to dji for a new gimbal in these feet they charged me about 185 dollars so that wasn't too bad it wasn't even the cost of what the care refresh was on the drone now the second crash i thought when it came down that it was going to be perfectly fine i've crashed harder than that with this drone and i didn't have any damage and when it came down for that second time um it broke one of the back arms so i had to send it out again yes initially i thought to myself i'll try to repair it myself but as i started taking this drone apart i was like holy crap there's a lot of tiny nuts and bolts and it just would have been repairing this would have been super difficult time consuming and i don't know if it would have ever been a hundred percent correct so it was just easier to pay another hundred and forty five dollars sent it out to dji and they were just gonna ship me out another drone so build quality for me is its biggest achilles heel but if you're not somebody who is going to plan on crashing which i know you can't plan for a crash but if you're not planning on crashing or beating this to hell this is probably going to suit you just fine as far as the build quality goes there's a lot to like on this drone that you're not going to find on other fpv quads such as there is an integrated heat sink which is a big deal because this means you can essentially leave this thing idling and when you're ready to go grab your shot you can take off and and get it which you can't do with an fpv drone you got to unplug it because it's going to get hot it requires that air passing through the flight controller and esc to keep certain components cool there's also a fan above the flight controller which helps keep it things a lot cooler so that is a nice piece as far as the build quality goes to top it off there's integrated leds all the way around this which at first i thought the leds were sort of gimmicky but i actually sort of like it when i'm flying with somebody i need i need a spotter or somebody uh you know visually observing they can see these at a bit of a distance now obviously if you remember a couple of weeks ago i got in trouble the faa contacted me about a flight i did with the fpv drone and it was because i didn't have a dedicated beacon so if you need to get yourself a beacon you can actually put them on top of here we actually made these mounts to where you can put a stick on beacon and then take it on and off when you don't need it so that is a nicety um you know beyond that the build quality you know it is what it is i like how the batteries uh get inserted into the drone i don't really like that the motors are built on a plastic arm i think that at the very least this should have been metal because i've seen a couple of situations where somebody has tore these motors directly off this piece here don't know how they said they didn't crash again we're taking their word for it but these motors have actually lifted off i do have a friend that crashed his um and burned down a motor several times and then i had another friend that didn't even crash his drone he said he was just taking off he felt the vibration landed and his motor was wobbling back and forth and upon further inspection it was actually torn off the plate and i firmly believe him that it was probably some sort of you know failure on the on the airframe itself that caused that so that's something to consider with that being said let's talk about the battery life on this drone all right so over the course of eight months time i've been running the same three batteries on this drone and for the better half of eight months my battery life has been pretty good although it has fluctuated i get about 10 to 11 minutes of battery life out of this drone when i'm in manual mode and that is if i'm flying cinematic and i'm using the word cinematic because that's not me doing any sort of crazy freestyle maneuvers and that's being very docile on the throttle you can get about 10 to 11 minutes now people complain that they're getting less i don't know what to tell you i get about 10 to 11 minutes of battery life on average when i'm not truly truly ripping on it some people get as little as five minutes and i've seen about the average is about eight to six minutes again if you're really controlling things you can get it down to about 10 minutes on the high end of things which is about what i'm getting and i've done numerous tests and they've all been pretty consistent with one another and i've had no problems these batteries do need to be maintained just because they are a smart battery doesn't mean they should be treated any different than any other lipo this is a 6s battery which means you want to keep this at a storage voltage about halfway and it's pretty easy to set these up to discharge through the dji app i really only charge these when i'm getting ready to fly otherwise i leave them on their storage voltage the other thing that i found throughout the duration of time was these antennas are in the feet of the battery so when you come down and land or just land in normal mode you would tend to hit these antennas i always get asked well what is this cover for well this cover was actually sort of inspired by ken herron when ken herron had his fpv drone he crashed it and he ended up breaking one of the antennas so after seeing him crash and break the antenna it gave us the idea to build these these are the dji fpv battery condoms as kelly calls them and it essentially just keeps this from getting torn up and it does sort of prolong the life expectancy of those landing feet because you're landing on the cover and not the battery itself so that's something that we thought of but i think the battery life is actually pretty excellent and it also i like the fact that when charging this i don't have to freak out that it's gonna go up into an eternal ball of flames that's never even crossed my mind since owning the dji fpb drone so that is something to consider all right let's talk about the camera quality on this drone alrighty so camera quality is is going to be somewhat subjective some people love the camera quality of the fpv drone and others dislike it me i sort of fall in the middle sometimes i look at the footage and i think to myself wow this really looks amazing and then other times depending on the situation and lighting i'm just like this looks absolutely terrible my biggest gripe with the fpv drone is that it has a hard time exposing for the shadows and it always tends to really crush them heavily and just makes it almost to the point where you can't recover any of that data and it just doesn't look really appealing and other times i find that it looks really excellent for the most part i tend to film in d cinelike that's going to give me the best amount of dynamic range with this quad although it does pose a bit of a problem when you are flying as it tends to wash everything out and when i was in colorado i ended up crashing the fpv drone because i couldn't see where i was going essentially because i was filming indecent alike and the snow was white and i just became snow blind and it nose dived into the snow so i would like to see that be something improved in a future version of the fpv drone is that if you're going to have this as the camera on here i think you need to have a dedicated fpv camera and then a dedicated recording camera so you can keep the two configurations separate so you can give the best possible quality to the pilot while also getting the best possible recording format and sometimes that means shooting in a flatter profile all in all i mean it looks good you don't have to use a gopro on the fpv drone i just do it because i find that the gopro footage is easier for me to color grade and then when you combine that with real steady or hyper smooth you're just getting a better image now that's not knocking really rock steady rocksteady does a great job when you're flying and again i'm using air quotes here cinematically i think you can get some really smooth footage out of rocksteady and it looks really really passable but for everything else i tend to use a gopro mounted on the top using my dji helmet and with the introduction of the hero 10 that's primarily what i've been using on the top of this drone it gives me sort of the best of both worlds where i get the stability of a gps drone but i get the dynamics of an fpv drone and you just have to know that when you mount a camera on top of here you should be flying a manual that's how you're going to get the best amount of performance is in the manual mode not flying in the standard mode so if you're a beginner you may want to skip mounting an fpv drone with a gopro but if you are somebody who's a little bit more advanced or you pass that beginner stage yeah mounting a gopro is going to give you a new dynamic and give you a whole new range of flexibility as far as the footage goes and that's why i continue to do that so i've had no problems i mean there's probably three or 400 units of my dji helmet floating around out there and everybody who's used them has had nothing but high praises about them shameless plug but um if you are interested in one there's a link in the description below for the dji helmet this is the blue version this is my uh sort of my tribute to 808 state this is kona blue this is limited edition we have an unlimited supply of the black versions but if you're looking for a blue version these will be gone in the next month before november but this is the kona blue version and i think it looks pretty damn good all right let's go ahead and talk about the performance of the fpv drone all right so performance is it's a sort of an odd subject because with this drone and when you think about fpv just in general you think of tinkering and you think about tuning and making your build your own and with the fpv drone you really can't make the build your own to a certain extent there are ways to circumvent some of the shortcomings with this drone but for the most part it is what it is and i hate that saying but honestly that is what it is you you can't tune this so you have to find ways around that and one of the ways that i found to make this better and perform better is by using these acon prop adapters once i switched over to these acon propped adapters i was able to mix and match different props and see what works best for my flying style and what i found is that the ethics p4 props and the gemfan s4 props work the best something about those two combinations just work really well typically i am flying the gemfam 4s props but i'm currently out so i had to mount a set of p4 props on here which they work well but i feel like the the response from the s4s are just slightly better than the p4 props at least on the dji fpv drone and it also makes it a little bit more easy for me to color match to whatever helmet or battery cover i have on this drone so um yeah but the performance of this has gotten better over the period of time dji has rolled out incremental update after incremental update for the fpv drone and with every update they haven't really outlined any of the improvements or highlighted any of the improvements as anything major but every single update tends to just remove just a little bit more prop wash from this drone and just enhances the overall feel and response from this and i have been noticing my motors have been coming down a little bit cooler and in my most recent flights with this i have noticed that there just hasn't been any of that shutter even with the fpv drone flying with the hero 10 which is incredibly taxing on something of this size where it's not meant to have a camera mounted to the top it did really really good even coming out of those heavy hard dives so that speaks a lot about what dji is doing i'm going to go ahead and throw up my rates so if you want to emulate the rates that i use this is just what i've found works best for my flying style and where i can get the smoothest flight but also maintain sort of that dynamic look alrighty let's go ahead and talk about the things that i don't like about this quad alrighty so the things that i don't like about the dji fpv drone are as follows the controller i'm not really a huge fan of the game style controller while this controller was super familiar to come from i used to use the tango 2 but i felt like it was just too small and it was just too cramped i still feel like for me as somebody who pinches i feel like the controller is just a little bit too small for me again that's somebody who pinches saying that this is too small but you if you thumb you may find this to be just fine the second thing that i don't like about this drone is that the gimbal tends to have some issues periodically and on harder landings i've noticed that it pops out and i have to pop it back in there's these little isolators in there and they are very very fragile and i've had to replace some of those isolators a few times already so that's something you want to think about if you're somebody who's going to come down and land hard you know a couple of times i flip forward and they've popped out the second thing piggybacking off of that is because of the way this gimbal is designed it does make it a little bit harder to use nd filters one of the biggest problems i have with using nd filters with the fpv drone is it tends to flip the camera down like the nd filter is just a little bit too heavy for the motors or the motors aren't capable of keeping up with the motions that i'm creating and it tends to flick down when using an nd filter it's a bit of a bummer but i get it it's not really designed for that and dji didn't put out an nd filter for this so that is something to also keep in mind and then the last thing is the fact that the camera settings there is no 30 frames per second which i filmed things in 30 frames per second i like that motion blur it creates there's also no 24 frames per second so i think those are things that they can improve on giving us more choices with frame rates and resolutions i think would be a lot more accommodating but as of right now there just isn't any way to do that and i think that that is a bit of a bummer alrighty all in all past eight months i think it's important to understand how you use this and what i've learned is that this is not for freestyle it's just not however what this does give me is the ability to get shots that i would normally have anxiety for with my typical fpv quads or i wouldn't trust them to make it back to me and and bring my gopro back in one piece primarily when flying over water i find that the fpv drone is probably the most safe option to take and it always makes it back to me and it just works really well i think that this sort of takes away those anxieties that many pilots have with your typical fpv drone now again this isn't for everybody and if you're somebody who's building your fpv quads then don't worry about it this isn't for you and nobody's making you buy this so you don't have to but to hate a product just because it's different or it's a gateway product into a hobby that has typically had this sort of barrier to entry a very high barrier to entry is is just stupid like the only way this hobby continues to grow is we bring more people on and i guarantee you once people start flying they're gonna get hooked on this just like i did if this was my first drone i probably wouldn't have bought or built so many fpv drones maybe i would have because i have an addictive personality that's why i stayed away from drugs all my life i i'd probably not be here today but if they got their hands on this they may want to get curious about something more this is this is a good gateway into the hobby of fpv and the fact that you do get a set of goggles when you purchase the fpv drone is a great value since these are so expensive and the fact that now this entire kit is a hundred dollars off i think that's a pretty good push for somebody to consider buying this in 2021 even with all the other things that are out on the market right now there's nothing that's going to give you the look of fpv other than an fpb drone some things have come close but nothing quite does it like flying manual and just being able to dive and chase after things but that's my review eight months later i think i finally get what this drone is for and who it's for and yeah it is for beginners but it's also for the intermediate pilots that want those redundancy and safeguards in place and they don't have a lot of time to build things but there you go if you enjoyed this video be sure to hit the like button subscribe if you already haven't and i'll catch you in the next video stay originally [Music] you know [Music] you

Channel: OriginaldoBo

Views: 131,096

Keywords: stayoriginal, originaldobo, DJI FPV Drone Long Term Review, dji fpv drone, fpv drone, dji fpv, dji fpv combo, v2 goggles, dji fpv drone unboxing, dji fpv drone footage, dji fpv drone combo, dji fpv drone range test, dji fpv drone long term

Id: LqmvddQZg8Q

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/zerzerohero]

amen, this thing brang me so much joy. Im scared to move to a ciniwhoop for fear of not looking back but yah, under rated product.