Image quality for both stills and video is excellent, although like most drones with a 1-inch sensor or smaller, the best results are achieved at lower ISO settings. The DJI Advanced/Pro gives you a different perspective on the world around you. With the extremely powerful 20 MP 1 inch CMOS sensor, the Phantom 4 Advanced/Pro delivers crisp, highly detailed outstanding photos as well as killer 4K video at 100Mbps. The flight autonomy makes the powerful Phantom a breeze to fly in the sky. The long lasting battery of 30 minutes allows you to fly for longer and safer with its multi-directional obstacle sensing. The Phantom 4 Pro costs $1,499, or $1,799 if you opt for the controller with the built-in screen.
Clip a tree at 100 feet in the air and it can either start an uncontrollable fall to the ground or, perhaps worse, get stuck like some cruel Christmas tree ornament you can see but never touch. Having the ability to avoid trees is especially important when using the return-to-home feature that summons the drone back to you. The DJI is a very polished drone compared to its competition, and for those who’ve flown a quad before, you’ll have no trouble getting started with this one. The new Sport mode lets you get to your location faster or just have some fun. Its Obstacle Sensing System can help avoid head-on collisions as well as track subjects. Slow-motion video is a nice addition to an already excellent camera.
With the dji drones, you can pick any subject in view on the DJI app (that receives the livestream from the drone’s camera), select it, and the Phantom will follow it, keeping it in frame. This means you could follow a bike, car, animal, anything that the drone can see, without having to use a ground-based GPS/location device . The onboard camera was redesigned to use a 1-inch 20-megapixel CMOS sensor. It’s the first DJI camera to use a mechanical shutter, eliminating rolling shutter distortion which can occur when taking images of fast moving subjects or when flying at high speeds.
In the case of flights near airports, that involves contacting the control tower and making them aware of your flight plan. If you want to see if an area is open for flight before you head to a location, check Airmap.io. The drone also has a Sport mode, which increases the maximum speed to 45mph, but absolutely no obstacle detection is enabled. It can go faster with help from the wind—the app told me that my Phantom 4 Pro was flying around 50mph in Sport mode for a good stretch of distance during one of my test flights. The advertised battery life of the Phantom 4 is 28 minutes per flight. For a first time drone user, this probably sounds short, but for those upgrading from other models, it really is quite impressive.
That said, if your laws are different than mine, you can soar this machine up to 19,685 feet. This is a service ceiling, you’re probably going to want to be 19,000 feet or higher yourself when you launch – very impressive no matter how you look at it. The spec sheet reports the same hover accuracy as the Mavic Pro and other DJI drones. While it does not use Ocusync, it is also rated for connectivity up to 4.3 miles as well, just like the Mavic Pro. The difference between the Phantom 4 Pro and the Phantom 4 Pro+ is the inclusion of a 5.5-inch built-in display on the remote of the Pro+. It’s a good looking, Android powered display, but it’s the only difference between the two machines.