There are more drones to choose from if you're looking to buy from DJI now that the drone maker is adding the Phantom 3 Professional and the Phantom 3 Advanced to the portfolio of quadcopters, and they boast a feature many drone owners want: a camera.
The Phantom 3 lineup, which is likely to expand further, not only has a camera but also a built-in stabilizer (also called a gimbal). The 'Professional' camera is a 4K, 12 megapixel camera and the Advanced features a 1080p, 12 megapixel. There will be a Phantom 3 without a camera, at some point, according to DJI's director of communications.
But the Phantom 3 also includes indoor positioning sensors, which should cut down on crashing and the drone maker's "lightbridge" which effectively eliminates the need for that WiFi dongle on the controller and related headaches of setting up a WiFi network. All you need now is a smartphone.
While the Phantom 2 Vision+ had a camera it had some weak spots. The Phantom 3 is a clear update and upgrade with more controls for exposure, color filters, shutter speed and ISO.
Maybe the best part, though, is that the Phantom 3, withal its extra and improved camera, is the same price as its predecessor Phantom 2 with a camera. The Advanced, minus the 4K camera, is even cheaper costing about $1,000.
As one report notes the Phantom 3 can hold position without a need for GPS location signal and the lens are better suited for low-light, which means the two drones are better equipped to handle indoor video, such as a wedding, and there's even an app that allows live video streaming right to YouTube. That could prove a boon for remote survey and incident recording.
"The platform has a downward-facing camera that creates a 3D map of the ground underneath it in real-time, and identifies key vectors in that map and notices if there's any movement of those vectors," DJI spokesman Michael Perry said.
Perry noted the drones' sensors deliver extremely accurate data about the drone's location (how high up it is) and allow it to fly closer to the group with easier take-off and landing with the touch of a button.
That could go far to aliening public anxiety about drones flying nearby given reports in 2014 on how a drone hit an athlete during a race and a photographer when a drone flew into a restaurant. It was a DJI drone that caused a bit of a stir at the White House in January when it crash-landed on the lawn.
Additional feature worth noting on the Phantom 3 drones is the expanded satellite tracking, which is getting more reliable and accurate.
