4 key questions to find out Hover Camera

Instead of being a jack-of-all-trades, this Hover Camera from Zero Zero Robotics is built specifically for taking selfies and follow footage — We asked four key questions to find out whether it’ll be worth the price of admission in the dawn of a burgeoning drone industry.

So what’s it all about?

There are three main features that give Hover Camera its distinctiveness (if we can call it that). To start with it’s aiming at a very specific market. It’s not really a high-performance aerial imaging machine. So where does it fit in? Well, it’s a low flying one take selfie drone at best and probably for reasons we’ll go into later. Another distinctive feature is its enclosed or ‘housed’ propellers that are electric fanlike in execution but evidently safe to handle. The Hover Camera is light (242g) with a foldable design that can fold into the size of a hardback book.

Does it perform well?

The quick answer would be a resounding no. It does’t perform well at all. But the easiest thing to do would be to break down the Hover Camera’s performance in the following ways.

Camera and image sensor – with a 1/3.06 inch CMOS sensor and 13 million effective pixels the Hover Camera’s camera is simply too small to capture decent images. It’s likely outdated too with a small sensor today’s mobile phone manufacturers wouldn’t even use.

GPS – the Hover Camera only has a paltry 20m wireless video transmission range, which is much shorter than Dobby’s at 100m and absolutely nothing compared to DJI’s Mavic Pro with 7km! However, since the Hover Camera uses optical flow and a front camera SDK to hover, it’s a lot small and ‘floaty’ than the Dobby or Mavic Pro and is therefore susceptible to catch drift in the wind.

Flight Time – a total flying time of just eight minutes and before you know how to even use it, you’ll be recharging or putting new batteries in for another quick round. In practical terms, eight minutes is simply not enough for any kind of photo-shoot without this small inconvenience. Zero Zero have countered this by claiming that they will be giving users spare batteries for orders but for the price, we’re not so sure.

On Board Intelligence – let’s just say that the Hover Camera doesn’t have much in terms of intelligent features ad certainly DJI’s Mavic Pro is the big daddy in that department. When we tested it the active track function lost track of it’s subject several times. A big no no. 

What’s that you say? More than $600!?

For a starting price of $599 and for the features you get and cost and low battery power time, we honestly think you’re better of with a $5 selfie stick and saving your money for a DJI Mavic Pro. Even if you do fork out for a Hover Camera you’ll soon be pining for something more sophisticated and with better overall performance. Mavic Pro is still even cheaper than that.

Verdict

If we had to rate this, it would be 2/10. Zero Zero Robotics have potential but this first generation of Hover Camera really blows. Its natural competitors would be the Dobby, Yuneec Breeze or even Parrot’s AR drones but we would go for any of them first before forking out for a Hover Camera.

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