Take Better Aerial Videos With This Drone That Folds as It Flies

DJI

If your GoPro has ever taken a ride on a drone, chances are it’s come back with some gorgeous, sweeping aerial videos… straddled by two spindly landing legs that obscure the left and right sides of the shot. It’s a challenge that drone-makers have tried to solve by spreading the legs apart or balancing the camera in various positions in front of the platform.

But DJI’s newest drone, called the Inspire 1, takes a new approach to solve this problem. Once the Inspire is launched into the air, it can move its landing gear out of the way to give the camera a full 360 degree view. It doesn’t just retract its legs like an airplane’s wheels: its entire carbon-fiber chassis, propellers and all, fold upwards into a ‘V’, leaving the camera isolated at the base. It’s a beautifully engineered solution, and it comes at a price: at $2,900 for the basic model, it’s twice as expensive as DJI’s previous flagship model, the Phantom 2 Vision+.

The Inspire offers some stellar features, all packed into an entirely new form factor that adheres to the same elegant aesthetic of the Phantom series. The camera, for starters, boasts 4K quality, 12-megapixel images, and the capability to shoot RAW format photos. It’s suspended on a 3-axis gimbal that can spin in a complete circle as well as up and down and side to side. A second camera and sonic sensors pointed downwards track distance and relation to the ground: this is how the drone determines when to fold into its landing position, and also enables it to be flown indoors without a GPS signal.

In the DJI tradition, everything on the Inspire is made by the company itself. It uses DJI’s proprietary gimbal, camera, and batteries for a seamlessly integrated system. The copter and the camera are primarily steered via a remote control, although the tasks of flying and filming can be split between two operators using two linked controllers. By plugging in an Android or iOS tablet, the pilot gains more telemetry and control features. In addition to displaying flight data, a live map, and battery life, DJI claims that the camera can stream HD video to the tablet from over a mile away. The camera’s settings, like white balance and exposure, can be set from the tablet while in flight; and the Inspire can use the tablet’s GPS as a “Dynamic Home Point” so it can return to the pilot even if they’ve moved.

The drawback to having a locked-down proprietary system is that it takes a while for some features to be perfected before DJI is willing to release them. Phantom users might be dismayed to know that the Inspire currently does not include way point autonomous navigation; nor will the much-awaited “Follow Me” feature be implemented in the first release of the system. A limited SDK was pushed out for the newest Phantom models this week, but is not compatible with the Inspire.

Without hands-on experience with the copter, I can’t vouch for whether it delivers on all it promises. But the ideas that it’s implementing are innovative, and it’s building on DJI’s strong reputation. If it’s as cleanly integrated, powerful, and easy to use as it claims to be, it might well be the next king of the turn-key drones.