The best drone you can buy

 

For the last few years there was a simple rule of thumb for drones. If you wanted the best picture and the most advanced features, you had to stick with a unit that was fairly large and expensive. If you wanted something easy to carry, you had to sacrifice on image quality, battery life, and range. A lot of drones on the market still feel this way. Sure you want to snag some epic aerial footage on your next vacation or weekend trip, but do you really want to lug around a case that seems designed for the nuclear codes?

Luckily there is a new breed of drone available. These units deliver stable 4K footage and battery life of 20 minutes or better, but they are small enough to slip into a slim backpack. The very best of the bunch can fit inside a purse or large jacket pocket. Suddenly a drone becomes something you can bring along just in case, a piece of gear that doesn’t have to be an awkward burden when you’re hitting the ski slopes or hiking up a mountain.

A week and a half ago, there were two new drones that fit this description, the DJI Mavic Pro and the GoPro Karma. The Mavic was the more powerful drone, but the Karma offered a more flexible set of tools for capturing great footage of an adventure. Unfortunately GoPro’s drones have been falling out of the sky, and the company wisely issued a recall on the product. That leaves one clear option for the drone you should buy this year: the Mavic Pro, a unit so far ahead of the competition that it’s hard to see why you would choose anything else.

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The Winner

DJI Mavic

The Mavic Pro is an amazing drone because it doesn’t force you to compromise. Its small size and clever form factor, with wings and rotors that fold up against the body, make it extremely portable and less intimidating to fly. But it still delivers great imagery, 27 minutes of battery life, and a whopping four miles of range.
Beyond the basics, the Mavic Pro has a strong selection of advanced features. It has forward-facing optical sensors that can see obstacles, and it will dodge them autonomously or put on the brakes if a space is too tight to navigate. It also has downward-facing optical sensors that help it safely land and allow it to hold its position indoors even when it doesn’t have a GPS signal.
The Mavic’s computer vision capabilities allow you to intelligently track subjects. Tap on a person or vehicle you see in your video feed and the Mavic will then follow this target. A new Profile mode allows the Mavic to perform this kind of tracking while flying alongside a subject, opening up options for some very cool tracking shots.
You can fly the Mavic with just the remote, just a mobile device, or a combination of the two. You don’t have to take the rotors on and off between flights, making it much simpler to set up and break down. And despite its relatively small stature, it can still keep up with action at 40 miles an hour.
Being so small does have a few drawbacks, however. You don’t have a lot of clearance from the ground when you land. The Mavic also gets pushed around more easily by strong winds. It does an admirable job correcting for them, but all that work also eats up its battery.
If you’re a professional looking for the absolute best-quality footage, larger drones may be better suited to your needs. But for the average consumer the Mavic is the obvious choice, offering all the features of a high-end camera drone in portable form factor that puts everything else on the market to shame.

The Runner-Up

Yuneec Typhoon H

The Typhoon H drone seemed promising when Intel showed it off at CES earlier this year. But it has been rapidly left behind. Sure it can capture crisp, smooth footage, and it delivered on its promised battery life, but the imagery you can get with it isn’t noticeably better than units which are far cheaper and smaller. This drone is too much, too late.

If you’re planning to fly your drone in punishing conditions, the Typhoon H, with its six rotors, was much better than the Mavic at holding its position against strong winds. And if you happen to lose one rotor in an accident, the unit can stay airborne and safely land itself. Like the Mavic it has forward-facing sensors that allow it to see and avoid obstacles, and downward-facing sensors that help it to stabilize and land.

But for most people, most of the time, this drone doesn’t offer a meaningfully better experience than drones half its size. The unit requires a bulky backpack for traveling. And its remote is monstrous. The DJI Mavic drone is actually smaller than the Typhoon H remote, which kind of says it all.

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