Drones tend to be incredibly costly and as a result are mostly for serious hobbyists or the more wealthy among us. If you wanted to pick up a solid drone that can shoot 4K you will have to be prepared to pony up.
So, if we want more accessible drones, who could we possibly turn to who has a track record for producing some seriously awesome products at incredibly affordable prices? Yep, Xiaomi, and the great news is that they’re doing drones now.
Meet the Xiaomi Mi Drone. It’s the company’s first stab at creating these unmanned aerial cameras and it honestly doesn’t look too bad. Sure, it may not be as good looking as something like the sexy DJI Inspire One, but it’s sleek enough to not be ugly.
There are two specifications to the Mi Drone. The first one shoots in 1080p via a 16-megapixel Sony backside illuminated CMOS camera with a 104-degree angle lens. If you want a higher resolution, the Mi Drone also has a variant that’s equipped with a 12-megapixel camera that shoots 4K video and can shoot stills in RAW format.
Xiaomi’s Mi Drone also has a host of sophisticated features to make sure it is as easy to fly as possible. These include a number of smart flight controls, autopilot, automatic take-off, landing and return home functions.
The Mi Drone also has built-in GPS and GLONASS support to allow for accurate positioning and safer flights. In the absence of a satellite connection, the drone can use vision positioning instead. This allows the drone to hover by itself at low altitudes (below 2.5m).
To make sure you fly safe and area in control of your drone, the Mi Drone has four layers of security:
1. Real-time location tracking for easy drone recovery
2. Real-time computing power to intelligently detect and allow the drone to automatically return home when its battery runs low
3. Automatic hovering at the edge of no-fly zones
4. A remote control with a PCB antenna array for a flight distance of up to 3km
Xiaomi is quoting the drone’s flight time (with its 5,200 mAh battery) to be 27 minutes on a single charge. That’s pretty good even when compared to the more expensive DJI Phantom 4 which has a quoted flight time of 28 minutes.
The 1080p variant of the Xiaomi Mi Drone will be crowd funded on the Mi Home app beginning tomorrow (26th May 2016) for RMB2,499 (around RM1,561). For RMB2,999 (around RM1,873), you can pick up the 4K Mi Drone instead, but that won’t be going on sale yet. Instead, Xiaomi will be putting the drone up for an open beta test programme come late July.
