Watching this Hover Camera review before investing $599

Hover Camera is foldable and portable,it folds like a book. Very easy, simple to fold. Looks nice, compact after folding.Though small, it is also equipped with a pretty decent little camera. It shoots video in 4K, stills at 13 megapixels, and even has a built-in flash.

Designing the cover is tricky. For maximum safety, it should cover as much of the propellers as possible. But covering the propellers comes at the cost of increased weight and reduced efficiency. Because of this, the cover has to be hollowed out as much as possible to reduce weight and extend flight time (in practice, the Hover camera helicopter can fly for about 8 minutes on a single charge).And the Hover camera isn’t efficient enough as this cover reduces flight efficiency significantly as admitted even by its product manager.

Another issue is that the Hover Camera connects to an iOS device over direct Wi-Fi, which limits its range.But of course Hover camera isn’t a full-featured drone like DJI’s Inspire or Phantom. While it does shoot 4K video and have a 13MP camera, it’s meant to be more of a close-up camera or tripod – not a true aerial camera. The WiFi connection will drop when it gets about 60 feet away from you, and it’s just not meant to fly that high. The WiFi connection did drop once or twice on me, but this was before I even asked the company what the limit was – so it was definitely occurring when I was pushing past that 60 feet boundary.

The biggest issue, however, is that the Hover Camera lacks what both the Mavic Pro and the GoPro Karma have: A stabilizing three-axis gimbal. This feature keeps their cameras rock-solid in the air, immune to vibrations and buffets of wind. That’s why video from either of those models will vastly outshine anything the Hover Camera is capable of producing – even if it has the desirable ultra-high-def 4k spec on paper.

Reviewers have noted that the Hover Camera video leaves a lot to be desired. There’s considerable vibration, which can produce a “jello” effect not seen in drones with quality stabilizing gimbals.

We found it very informative to watch Norm Chan’s Tested review. Norm starts out really, really wanting to like this drone. But the more he used it, the more he found it needed work. (Not only were there problems with the video quality, Norm also found some problems with the Hover Camera’s tracking abilities. When walking down the street with the drone following him, Norm found it could “lose tracking, and then crash into a tree or something. Not very impressive.”

As for the video?

Here is a short video using the Hover Camera Passport for those of you who want to see it in action:

“There just isn’t enough processing power to give you high quality video,” he says.

That’s not to say this machine doesn’t have some merits. But if you’re considering the Hover Camera, we’d encourage you to invest less than 10 minutes watching this review before investing $599.

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