Hover Camera review

A new foldable drone has been revealed with a much cheaper price tag. The Hover Camera Passport, the company’s first camera drone, is it a good choice as a first drone for new flyers? Let’s take a look.

The Pros

Portable: The Hover Camera Passport’s size and folding factor are incredible. It truly can fit into a purse or backpack with ease and the cage protecting the propellers keeps them from harm. It’s also very lightweight at just over half a pound.

Safe: The enclosed propellers prevent them from hitting anything or anyone. Very few drones have something like this to make for safer flight.

Easy to Use: The Hover Camera Passport really does fly with the press of a button and can be placed by hand to to the location where it should hover. It uses Wi-Fi to connect to a phone and the drone can then be controlled using a dedicated app. It uses sensors on the bottom and front to keep itself in place.

The Cons

Tracking Needs Work: While the Hover Camera Passport is certainly capable of tracking, it’s far from perfect. Most reviewers, such as Norm from Tested, found that the framing was off and while tracking, the drone would easily get lost.

Low Image Quality: The video quality is essentially not usable. While it has 4K resolution, the electronic stabilization and image quality make for an unstable, grainy image. Compare this to something like the $399 US Phantom 3 Standard, which provides up to 2.7K sharp, stable video. Stills may be usable on the Hover Camera, but video is comparable to a cheap smartphone. Stability is better indoors, but still not great.

Overall, the Hover Camera seems like more a novelty than a good drone for first-timers. Going back to a drone like the DJI Phantom 3 Standard, one can accomplish incredible video while also learning the basics of flight and still use several smart features through the DJI Go app. The Phantom 3 Standard also features longer battery time and more reliability. For a first timer, it’s important to actually learn to fly and have a drone that can provide quality images and a new perspective as opposed to a gadget that is cool to try but doesn’t bring anything new to one’s life. Of course, the Phantom is not as portable. While the Mavic Pro comes in a portable and powerful drone.

Flying drones is now truly something anyone can do. If you are thinking of getting your first drone, don’t be afraid to ask questions and learn as much as you can before you purchase. You can even find a friend who has one or ask a dealer for a demonstration. Once you start flying, you’ll likely never turn back!

 

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INSPIRE 2 DNG VIDEO

Filmmakers must be familiar with the Cinema DNG. First published in 2009, the CinemaDNG specification established an open raw cinema format upon which interoperable digital cinema workflows can be implemented. In 2011, Adobe officially turned over control and support of the CinemaDNG specification to a community of partners to ensure its future and encourage industry adoption. Digital cinema cameras have led to an increasing trend in the usage of RAW workflows and proprietary RAW formats.

The newly DJI Inspire 2 features an all-new image processing system which records at up to 5.2K in Cinema DNG RAW, Apple ProRes and more.Chinese folks from Wetouchsky took an DNG format video and show you the highlights.

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You have to try pretty hard to actually crash the thing

The Phantom 4 Pro is an upgrade from Phantom 4. You can now fly a full 31 miles per hour while obstacle avoidance is engaged. Previously, if you wanted to go that fast, you had to put the drone into Sport Mode, which disengaged crash avoidance. It has rear sensors now, too, so you have obstacle avoidance even when you’re backing up. A new return-to-home feature retraces the path it originally took (more or less), so there’s even less chance of it crashing if you lose you connection with the remote (plus, obstacle avoidance will be engaged). It’s debuting infrared sensors, too, and even more angles—basically, you now have to try pretty hard to actually crash the thing. All of this, plus the flight time has been bumped to a generous 30 minutes.

Extra obstacle sensors are nothing to sneeze at, but the real reason to opt for the Phantom 4 Pro over the standard Phantom 4 is the camera.The Phantom 4 Pro uses an all-new video camera with a 1-inch image sensor, 4K video recording at up to 60p, and 20MP Raw and JPG image capture. The 1-inch sensor size has proven to be a very capable format in compact cameras like the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 III.

The reason is simple—surface area. The 1-inch sensor is about four times the size of the more typical 1/2.3-inch class used by most drones (including the Phantom 3 series and the Phantom 4), flagship smartphones, and point-and-shoot cameras. You can pack more pixels onto the sensor—20MP has been the standard for some time—while maintaining solid image and video quality at higher ISOs, and capturing more detail in images than you can with a smaller imager.

In addition to the larger sensor, the camera adds aperture control and a mechanical shutter. Its field of view (24mm equivalent) is slightly narrower than the 20mm lens used by the Phantom 4, but you aren’t stuck shooting at f/2.8 all the time—you can stop down all the way to f/11. This reduces to reach for neutral density filters to balance shutter speed and frame rate to maintain proper shutter angles and exposure.

The mechanical shutter is there to eliminate the rolling shutter effect—if you do get a propeller in a shot, it won’t show the jello-like effect that you get with many cameras that use electronic shutters for video capture. You still have to contend with the Phantom’s propellers creating a flickering effect when approaching the sun at a certain angle—slowing down your shutter speed can help to ameliorate the effect.

Video recording options are vast. If you want to capture the highest resolution 4K DCI, typically used for cinema productions due to its 2:1 aspect ratio, video can be shot at 24, 25, or 30fps. If you shoot at UHD, 4K in a 16:9 format, you can choose from 24, 25, 30, or 60fps. All 4K footage is compressed at a 100Mbps bit rate, using H.264 compression. You can also use the more modern, efficient H.265 codec, but you’ll lose the ability to record 4K footage at 60fps if you do.

The Phantom 4 Pro blows all other drone cameras out of the water (including the GoPro Hero 5). It has much higher resolution photos, less compression when shooting video and higher frame rates.If you haven’t received your Mavic Pro, you could get Phantom 4 Pro soon.

 

 

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DJI Phantom 4 vs Mavic Pro: Who can hold up in the wind?

Let’s face it; the Mavic Pro is much smaller than the Phantom 4, so does that mean it won’t hold up in the wind? Not at all. We put both of the drones through extreme winds using a powerful leaf blower and both did better than you would expect. One thing we noticed with the Phantom 4 is that in high winds, it tends to drift up much more than the Mavic Pro. We had to reshoot the video a few times because the Phantom 4 would just keep drifting up out of the camera view.

The Mavic Pro seemed to hold its position better, but the video didn’t look as stable as the Phantom 4. This is mostly because the Mavic has a narrower field-of-view, so any movements of the drone are more noticeable.

In most situations, both drones will handle the typical wind gust better than in this test, because real wind usually doesn’t have as much turbulence. This is more like what the drones would experience if strong wind gusts came along.

The main advantage that the Phantom has is that it has a higher top speed, so it will keep its speed better when going into the wind.

As for the video quality, as you know the Mavic Pro has a whole new camera that’s much smaller than the Phantom 4. The size of the lens on the Phantom 4 is similar to what you would find on a GoPro, where the Mavic is more like a high-end Android phone. It’s tiny, but surprisingly it works. The videos from the Mavic don’t come out with as much digital sharpening as the Phantom 4, but if you add some sharpening in post-production (or turn the sharpening up in the DJI Go app), the video looks (to my eyes) just as sharp. I personally don’t like how much sharpening the Phantom 4 has because it produces more strange artifacts in the images, but I found that those same artifacts don’t exist on the Mavic Pro!

Low light performance on the Mavic Pro is ok, but I think the Phantom 4 beats it by a hair. Both drones go up to ISO 3200, but I would try not to go past 800 or things will go downhill. This is the case for all small cameras, including the GoPro hero 4 and hero 5.

As I mentioned before, the Mavic has a narrower field-of-view (or FOV) compared to the Phantom 4, so shots that you take will look like they were taken with a 28mm lens on a full frame camera. The Phantom 4 isn’t as wide as the GoPro, but it’s still equivalent to a 20mm lens which is approaching the ultra wide lens category. I personally like the Mavic’s FOV because it allows me to get shots that are closer to the action without being “dangerously” close.

I don’t have an example to show right now, but one thing I noticed about flying the Mavic is that you can point the camera up when hovering and you hardly see the propellers at all! The Propellers also seem to show up less in forward flight.

The last thing you should know about the Mavic’s camera is that it doesn’t have a fixed focus like the Phantom 4. This means you need to tap what part of the image you want to be in focus while in the DJI Go App. Having a fixed focus is good and bad. It’s good because you can focus on closer subjects and the background will look slightly more out of focus like a DSLR. It can also make the subject that you’re filming appear sharper. The only bad part is, you have to remember to do it, or your images will come out blurry.

 

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You could get them if don’t go with the $599 Hover Camera

Drones have evolved quickly in the past few years, but lately we’re entering a new era. Instead of stuffing them with every feature known to man, manufacturers are building them with features and specs that target a particular type of use — like racing, FPV, or filmmaking.

The Hover Camera Passport from ZeroZero Robotics is a prime example of this trend. Instead of being a jack-of-all-trades, this drone is built specifically for taking selfies and follow footage.

The Hover Camera 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 arial camera.Here are some selfie shot images from it.

You can see the image quality is essentially not usable. While it has 4K resolution, the electronic stabilization and image quality make for an unstable, grainy image.

However, the main purpose of buying Hover Camera is Camera.  And from this point of view it provides very low value for the price:

You have $599 to spend on a camera, there are so many great cameras for the same price.

1.Some entry-level DSLR’s  are cheaper than Hover Camera and can provide better image quality in both photo and video.

2. Middle class mirrorless camera with great image quality and stabilization

3. If you would like a camera that can fly, consider the Phantom 3 Standard which is actually $200 cheaper than the Hover camera. And it provides up to 2.7K sharp, stable video. Stills may be usable on the Hover Camera, but video is comparable to a cheap smartphone. Stability is better indoors, but still not great.

Hover Camera Passport isn’t the only company trying to usher in a world where we can all toss a drone into the air in a few seconds to capture life’s complexities. There are heavy-hitters like GoPro and drone maker DJI, and startups like Lily and Vantage Robotics, that are all trying to corner the personal flying camera market.

Looking at the current drone and digital cameras market it becomes very clear that Hover Camera is an overpriced product. However if you can accept the value that Hover provides for the price it definitely will be a great choice.

 

 

 

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