This weekend my friend Gary Yost took out his new DJI Inspire 1 for some test flights. The footage is so pretty I thought it was worth sharing.
Though overall he loves the Inspire 1, he does have some criticisms. In his words:
The great news is that this craft is so stable it’s like putting a virtual tripod in the sky, and flight dynamics are predictable and rock solid, even in high wind. The results we’re getting are extremely exciting and we’ll be doing more testing this week with some interesting subjects.
Extremely important:
1) Without a couple of different ND filters, temporal aliasing is an issue. We need 4- and 6-stop NDs soon.
2) As many have reported, my iPad Air2 also crashes when running Pilot app (0.9.2) on the Master Tx. At least the bird seems to hover well if it’s in GPS when it crashes (does it hover when it’s in Atti during a crash?) and RTH works fine.
3) iPhone6 running Pilot app on the Slave Tx occasionally completely locks up. Sometimes requiring a manual restart of the phone (both buttons) and sometimes it crashes and restarts the phone automatically.
4) There’s no histogram, and the zebras on the HDMI display on the Slave Tx seem to be completely nonexistent. If zebras are impossible to display on HDMI, then we at least have to have a full-screen histogram mode for the Slave Tx’s Pilot app so we can properly judge exposure. On a chip with this kind of limited dynamic range, we absolutely need a histogram (or a waveform or RGB Parade) in order to get correct exposure.
5) I can’t figure out how to add any exponent or limit gain on the Slave Tx’s camera controls. Is this even possible? As of now, even with the lightest touch, starting a pan during a shot causes a motion discontinuity that sucks, and ending a pan during a shot is even worse. We need to be able to add exponent to tilt and yaw for the camera for easing in and out of a move.
6) For the Master, how do you add exponent to Pitch and Yaw? I once found these two curves but can’t seem to find them again. Were they in the General Settings/Rate control? For me now, Rate is a disabled switch. Nothing happens when I click on it.
Very important:
7) For Master Pilot App in Map mode, the map ought to auto-scroll when the craft gets near the edge of the map.
8) There are some nasty compression artifacts in the codec (for 4K/24 and 4K/30 at least, which is mostly what I’ve been using). For finely textured areas, like big grassy fields, there’s an unbelievable amount of macro blocking. For less textured things it’s not as noticeable. 1080 seems to be better but I have to do more testing with this over the next few days.
9) There is no Record On/Off status in the HDMI display, which is a huge downer for the Slave Tx. If you’re using goggles as the camera operator, it’s very important to have a simple little symbol to show you that you’re recording. Right now you have to flip up the goggles to confirm recording and then you get blinded by natural light, blah blah blah.
10) There is no indicator of what gimbal mode you’re in on the HDMI display. You want to see some indication of that… just something simple, but it’s important. The less the camera op has to take the goggles off to fiddle with the app, the better.
11) As many people stated, the home point diamond on the HDMI display is pretty wacked. Doesn’t really seem to work at all. Same with HDMI attitude indicator.