Does Hover Camera Sacrifice Performance for Size?

Zero Zero’s new Hover Camera is a unique offering – a tiny, foldable camera with wings. You can easily control it with your smartphone or even let it follow you around as it automatically tracks and captures you on camera. But while the concept is appealing, questions remain: is the technology ready for being rolled out to the market? Which such constraints put on engineers and components due to size, it’s a challenge to create a high-performing product.

Let’s take a look at how the Hover Camera performs in real life, in three important aspects.

Stability

This tiny drone by necessity comes with tiny motors and propellers powered by a tiny battery. This leads is to wonder how it performs outdoors, in moderate to strong winds. As we found in our hands-on tests and as confirmed by Tested in their review, the Hover Camera has trouble even with the slightest bit of wind, and is easily pushed away from its path. Together with the fact that it uses Electronic Image Stabilization instead of a mechanical gimbal, the Hover Camera is just not stable enough for reliable image-making.

Flight time

There’s no way around the fact that a tiny drone can only fit a tiny battery. The Hover Camera has a real-world flight time of about 7 minutes while filming, meaning that you have to carefully plan every shot so as not to run out of batteries. This means that while small, Zero Zero’s drone takes a lot of effort to use even though the product is supposed to be effortless.

Camera

The Hover Camera also packs a tiny camera sensor that performs on par with 2-3 year old smart phones, much below what an iPhone 7 or Samsung S7 can do. Because of the small sensor, both low light and bright light photography suffers as the dynamic range is simply too small. Night time photos are noisy and dark, while sunny photos exhibit blown out highlights and little detail.

The vision recognition feature also suffers in low-light conditions for the same reason.

Conclusion: Toy-like performance

Because of the compromises made in engineering the Hover Camera and the current state of technology, this flying camera really only performs as expected under ideal conditions. Any time it is moved outside of the lab, it becomes more like a toy than a product with a $600 price tag.

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