Dji Phantom 3 vs the Phantom 2 - whats new ?

The phantom 3 from dji brings quite a lot of new features and improvments across but from my own phantom 2 experience I want to tell you what I need and see if the phantom 3 delivers on that.

Indoor Aerial filming

The phantom 2 would be incredibly hard to get steady meaningful indoor shots as the motion of the drone is going to be more random due to there being no GPS available indors - doh of course not !
The phantom 3 has the same underside camera/sensor recognition system so that it can feedback motion from the floor detail into the brain of the drone and correct - I would be keen to know if this also works outside to augment the GPS or if that is then just ignored.

Camera Control - the biggie for me

A big issue for me is not having access to any video camera controls while in the air - we do have tilt control for the gimbal in the phantom 2 of course but now the phatom 3 brings in start and stop recording (how many times I have landed to realise that I wasnt recording I am ebarassed to say !) and there are some exposure contros I believe too. The software allows some further custom Tx (Transmitter) inputs for you to assign in the software. I am not quite sure what you would use these for yet.

The Undercarriage widening

Sometimes the undercarriage will get into wide angle shots from the gopro from the phatom 2 - you might also get prop in video issues if there is wind or you are moving forwards and the attitude of the phantom is forward props down. The phantom 3 doesnt seem to address the latter however a more powerful motor might mean you can move forwards with less 'attitude' to be tested. These lead you to doing more post editing of your footage. You can still get some real excellent aerial video with both these systems and indeed the phantom 1 too.

The Battery and Duration

A 4S (14.8v) lipo now instead of 3 cells now 4 with more mAh's (mili amp hours , think duration) should give an extended flight time. in fact I get 16 minutes on average and I find this is more than enough to get my shot even 2 different shots - I shoot one then repeat a couple of times and down...shot done hopefully and then go for my next shot this works well for me. Would like to get some comments here on how the Phantom 3 endures...

here is the great unboxing and explaination of this Phantom 3 which is the vision version (includes video camera now 4k and a flatter non fish eye lens)

I would have liked to see some follow me technology OOTB as this is going to be a feature that boaters for example would like to use and the multi rotor follows the 'homing device'

Also missing is a car charging solution - I have read that it does your car battery no good at all and that you should use a separate leisure battery for this purpose. If you look at some other chinese drone manufacturers they are giving some of these features away and the phantom for me at the moment isnt the natural selection anymore. However reliability and time will come into play and its too early to tell yet. We hope the phantom 3 isnt plagued by the inspire software issues that it had after launch and I think not as it seems you are getting inspire 'kit' in the phantom uprated shell.

An impressive package and I hope they send me one to demo soon.

More info in this video and yes eric's back...