Two hobbies I am passionate about are flight simming and photography/film. Over the past few months I have been eyeing up a new drone called the DJI Mavic Pro which comes with a 4K camera mounted on a gimbal capable of some incredible footage and photographs. I had always kept an eye on drone technology but never was very interested before now. Well, what can I say after 3 weeks of flying the Mavic Pro? If you like flying and photography then it's a must have. It's a bit pricey (not so much compared to our simming hobby) but I can say if you can afford it, then it's completely worth the cash. The tech inside it is simply incredible. There all sorts of fancy features built in like a follow-me mode, active tracking in a variety of ways (profile, 360 around the target etc.), elevation tracking (the drone can follow the elevation of the landscape for smooth footage), a retrun to home function if you mess up, self landing once you are 1 m above the ground and trigger it, waypoint tracking, points of interest rotation, and the ability to fly up to 8km away whilst transmitting a 1080p stream to your mobile device which plugs into a nifty controller. Of course, you need to follow a ton of rules and keep line of sight (so forget the potential 8km flying distance) but once you are careful and responsible, it's a ton of fun to fly. I made the video below at the weekend testing out some ND filters I bought for the lens. I'm curious how many flight simmers on here fly drones for fun and what is your expierience and opinion of them?

 

Thanks for the informative post about your "newest hobby." It looks like a lot of fun, albeit an expensive bit of kit! My hobby budget is blown for the next few years, having just laid out several grand on a new amateur radio and accessories...

Great video, thanks for posting.

I share the flightsimming and photography passion, but came to droning from RC helicopters. Between crashes 😊 I had strapped on a little 640 pixel cam and thought: “This might get interesting”. I graduated to a Parrot AR drone, but stopped for a while after losing it to the greedy forest,

The Parrot was fun, but no aerial photography tool. DJI’s were (then) too expensive for a casual hobby, so there it languished.

When the Mavic was announced, I was intrigued, and two things happened: the delivery time was extended beyond the Christmas rush due to demand, and the prices of the legacy DJI’s started dropping. You can now get a DJI Pantom 4 Pro for the same price as a Mavic.

You can see the dilemma: I am wondering if the Mavic, apart from its form factor, is the better deal.

It looks a little fragile to me, and from experience you want the most rugged flyer you can get. And the Phantom 4 is a serious camera unit.

I’d be interested in user feedback, especially about limitations of the Mavic in practice.