 The Phantom 4 from DJI is by a long shot the best flying vehicle I have ever had the pleasure of using and I'll spend the next seven or so minutes telling you why Intel's Skull Canyon NUC features a sixth generation core i7 quad core processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more at the link in the video description Right out of the box the Phantom 4 impressed me It's small its light thanks to the magnesium chassis and the packaging can actually be reused as a really robust carrying case It'll hold the quad a metric whacked on a spare propellers the controller and either two batteries or a battery and a charger That's pretty much all that a recreational user will need although There's still room for accessories like hard cases and backpacks for the pros the setup process is fairly easy Thanks to the documentation, but still a little tedious So after charging the batteries it took about 20 minutes of you know how do I turn this on? It's a quick press followed by a long press by the way Screwing on the pill bottle style locking propellers running around looking for a lightning cable I used an iPhone 6s for this review by the way Updating the firmware and figuring out where to put a micro SD card only to realize that a 16 gig one is included out of the box bonus I did my first latency test of the first person view camera feed and It is hard to say how much of this is generational improvements I mean my solo is just about a year old now And how much of it is DJI's use of a hardline USB connection instead of that whole kledgy? Connect to a Wi-Fi access point here that connects wirelessly to the drone relay, but wow This is head and shoulders better than anything. I've used before I mean It's not like twitch reflex high-speed flying capable gear like those blokes in the drone racing league are using But it is certainly responsive enough to not be an excuse for a photographer or a videographer to miss a shot At least when it's sitting in the entryway of my house literally one meter away from the controller more on that later now some folks can go on and on about how sexy the Phantom 4 is but Drones don't really turn my crank, and I feel like if you've seen one quadcopter you kind of seen them all it's got like You guessed it four propellers yay So it's the underlying tech that gets me excited here, and let's get it up in the air while we discuss the motors have been upgraded for about a 20% improvement in top speed that's up to 72 kilometers per hour in sport mode with the 5300 milliamp hour LiPo battery rated at a maximum of 28 minutes though this assumes a very steady flight and optimal conditions Not being a drone ace I personally didn't find much reason to whip around that fast, but there is more to the improved motors than just I want to go faster And in the normal P mode the most impressive thing to me about the phantom 4 is its stability in the air P or position mode uses a combination of GPS downward facing cameras Ultrasonic emitters their new inertial measurement unit and these upgraded motors to achieve something I just hadn't seen yet nearly perfect hovering and shockingly fast self correction during small gusts of wind or when the user Suddenly let's go of the sticks in the middle of a maneuver and it needs to compensate to get back to a hover It's so Confidence inspiring to see it behave so predictably in the air that I was actually willing to let my four-year-old son Help me fly it in my lap something. I wouldn't have even Considered with any other drone that I have touched some of which theoretically hover when you let go But in practice require a fair bit more user intervention than that Which doesn't mean it flies itself if you don't want it to purists can switch to the less helpful attitude mode which turns off the GPS system and lets you bank and drift through corners much more Naturally, I mean I think the bottom line about the phantom 4 is that flying it is just Such a pleasure however manual or not manual you want it it behaves smoothly and predictably and the first-person view is fantastic just Fantastic I mean to be clear I am aware that there are DIY solutions that can handle even lower latency and longer range But to say I was blown away When I flew for 20 minutes around the corner of a building and up to a kilometer away Which is as far as I can go maintaining line of sight with my binoculars anyway Without so much as a compression artifact on the video feed would be an understatement Again the 3d are solo also a very good drone went a similar distance But not in a confidence inspiring manner I mean it would glitch out here and there and the video feed was anything but HD by that distance Which leads us pretty well then into the camera it is great I was quite critical of DJI initially for moving to their own proprietary camera system instead of collaborating with a market leader like GoPro except whether they saw this coming or it was just a lucky guess GoPro has sat on their ass and done absolutely nothing noteworthy in the last year and a half While DJI has been innovating so the camera is slightly sharper than the phantom 3 professional And while I lack one personally for comparison It is really really similar to the inspire one based on this fantastic video from Falcon RC hobby And the gimbal actually has an added support link as well for better stability the 120 FPS 1080 recording mode was quite Disappointing and I'll let you be the judge of its low-light performance So this is 1080 60p footage as we were approaching dusk on an otherwise sunny and beautiful day But my overall takeaway here is that the footage is professional grade stable and looks Amazing what a payoff for DJI on that gamble which leads us pretty well then into the phantom force touted autonomous flying modes I Have no use personally for click to fly where you touch the touchscreen and it goes where you touched I can operate control sticks, but the object tracking mode that I'm using on my bike here is freaking sick You drag a box around the object you want to track and the phantom 4 follows it using its front mounted cameras to either avoid oncoming obstacles or go around them and under carefully controlled conditions, it's Amazing it actually uses the visual tracking rather than a link to the remote control unit the way most of these solutions work Yet it actually managed to produce more usable footage of a moving subject running around below it than my 3d are solo With that said though it has a long way to go before I will trust it in the way that I do the phantom force other features a quick moving subject can easily shake off the drone and from my experience taking my bike for a very sweaty Stressful ride around the neighborhood even under what I would consider to be pretty ideal conditions with a high-viz yellow object to track the Altitude and the following distance of the drone was all over the place It lost me twice while maneuvering slowly and the collision avoidance system managed to scrape a street lamp Though fortunately without crashing stop dead in front of a branch that it wasn't gonna hit instead of going around it and Not stop itself as I crept towards fairly dense foliage pulling into my driveway It works sometimes But it's not a mode that I would actually use unless I had the kind of income that would make buying a new phantom four Basically inconsequential which leads us then to the conclusion here because the phantom four is not cheap is it worth the money? well Not if you don't have a thousand dollars lying around I suppose But if you were shopping for a fancy quadcopter for pleasure or even light professional use man The lack of an HDMI output on the controller without a hundred dollar add-on module and some tinkering is a bummer But I can't criticize much else about it It's not as much of a blast to rip around in the park as a fully manual even a fixed wing Quite frankly and it feels more like a tool to use than a toy to go out and play with But that doesn't mean that it's boring and combined with some creativity The phantom four really packs a lot of fun into its functionality Bottom line this thing spanks. I'm gonna try and popularize that that spanks, bro So here's some good news mass drop you might know them from such deals as deals on knives deals on camping supplies deals on keyboards or deals on audio gear the way that mass drop works is they find authorized resellers or manufacturers and they say hey We've got this huge community of enthusiasts if you drop your price We can get a bunch of people to buy and then they go to the enthusiasts They say hey if a bunch of you guys commit to buy we can get them to drop their price and they've recently branched out into Exclusive products as well, so they're actually working with hi-fi man to bring back their HE 300 headphones with a special MD or mass drop edition twist So at the beginning solely under the hi-fi man brand these Entry level can you really call them that headphones were priced at 300 US dollars? So the new ones are very similar to the older HE 300s But with an updated and more lightweight structure a more neutral sound signature and an all-black Appearance compared to the silver and black of the older generation product But the most important change is they have reduced their price by a little bit The only change is they have reduced the price to an actually legitimately low 99 US dollars So check out those headphones and more over at drop.ps Slash LTT-H-350 or more conveniently linked in the video description So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do But if it was good get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions up there by buying a cool shirt like this one link down there We're with a direct monthly contribution through our community form which is also linked down there And you can ask tech questions and discuss tech and all that cool stuff With all that out of the way you're probably wondering what to watch next so check out that video in the top right where I What's a good channel super fun that we've done recently oh yeah check out the murder mystery channel super fun. It's awesome