Yuneec Breeze 4K review

Yuneec‘s first selfies drone Yuneec Breeze 4K is the drone equivalent of a cellphone camera, complete with an over-emphasis on selfies.

Would I bring it to a high-end real estate photo shoot? No, but it’s good at what it does: it’s loads of fun to fly and it produces the kind of images that will look good shared on small screens via Instagram and YouTube.

The Yuneec Breeze 4K is lightweight and designed to fit in a backpack, though at 13 ounces, it still needs to be registered with the FAA. The plastic body feels a little more fragile than that of the GDU Byrd, which I happened to be testing at the same time. The good news is that pretty much every part you’re liable to break is for sale individually, making it easy, if perhaps costly, to get your drone back in the air should you crash or otherwise break it. Also, it comes in a little suitcase that keeps it protected from drops while you’re carrying it.

The Yuneec Breeze 4K comes with a 4K-capable camera (30fps) on board, though there are several important caveats to bear in mind. First, there is no stabilizing gimbal, so the steadiness of your video is directly proportional to your skills as a pilot. Recognizing that the newcomer won’t have those piloting skills yet, the Breeze includes a host of preprogrammed auto-flying modes that go a long way toward improving stability and therefore video quality. There’s also some built in digital stabilization, but, and here’s the second caveat: digital stabilization only works with 1080p video, not 4K footage. While the Yuneec Breeze 4K clearly wants to tout its 4K capabilities, they’re of limited usefulness without stabilization.

Back to the controller, or rather lack of controller. Yes, the Yuneec Breeze 4K controller is a smartphone app. The controller consists of virtual joysticks that behave just like the real thing, minus all the tactile feedback that can help with your reaction times. But again, the manual controls are almost an afterthought here, the real selling point is the plethora of automated flight modes. You get the usual flight modes that every current drone has (follow me, orbit mode) plus a few others (selfie mode, journey mode, manual pilot mode).Follow me and orbit modes work like they do in Yuneec’s larger, more expensive drones. Selfie mode ditches the control interface entirely and instead offers a slider for controlling the camera. Journey mode was the most impressive—it starts with a fly-away shot and then comes zooming back in. The resulting video is nice and smooth.

In terms of the image quality, video can be a little soft at times, and stills probably won’t look good as 16×20 prints. For online sharing, it’s more than good enough most of the time. The one place I found it just didn’t work well was in follow me mode where too tight of a shot made for jerky camera movements as the drone tried to keep up.

Backing it up a bit in altitude fixed the problem, but highlighted the other big shortcoming: the Yuneec Breeze 4K really only stays aloft for about 10 minutes. Yuneec includes two batteries in the box, which doubles the flight time to 20 minutes if you switch batteries. That should be enough time to get all the selfies you need.

Yuneec Breeze 4K is a nice choice for newcomers, for more selfies drones, please refer here.

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