[olafura]

Refreshingly honest about the video quality you should expect in the main promo video. Typical problems like dynamic range, color profile, light bleed and tracking problems with the top of the head being cut off at one point. Pretty typical unless you spend more money on your drone or camera equipment. There are so many companies that fake the footage or pick much easier shooting locations.

[roughly]

I think this is going to be one of those things where we learn that nobody actually cares about any of that outside these forums. MP3s were garbage, early camera phones were garbage, Snap picture quality generally is garbage, bluetooth headphones suck, all of these things were and are decried by the tech community, and it turns out that people just don't care, because even at garbage quality it's still cool to have a robot take your picture.

[xarope]

I do some extreme sports for hobbies, where I am often the only person with the sense of mind to take shots with my trusty olympus TG2 (yes it's old, but still works) of others with me, whether underwater or 6Km above. My professional photographer friend often berates me for my framing, perspective, lighting choices etc, but when I'm hanging almost upside down and only using one hand covered by a mitt, whilst nobody else has the energy to pose or even think of stopping, I think there's only so much you can do.

Anyway, the point is, my friends have lots of pictures of themselves doing these activities, versus non at all.

[majormajor]

Even without the robot angle "cool" aspect of a drone, it's a step along a progression that's shown clear demand: first selfies, then selfie sticks, then no-stick-needed non-selfie selfies.

[bamboozled]

Having a robot taking your picture only sounds cool go hacker news people ?

[dvt]

Except that mp3s sucked until the iPod, and camera phones sucked until the iPhone. The idea that product quality, ease of use, UX/UI, or polish doesn't matter is just wrong. This thing is absolutely going to bomb (reminds me of GoPro's Karma) and I'd bet money on it, but SNAP stock is already in dire straits, so their incompetence is probably priced in.

[mrtksn]

I was very surprised to hear the rotor buzz. Most drone promo videos pretend that when the motors spin, it makes moody beats sound.

[serf]

I was too busy being deafened by Frank Sinatra a split second after the rotor noise played to even remember hearing the rotor noise; rather than faking the silence they just over-wrote my memory of it in the advertisement with shock-and-awe style Sinatra -- I guess that's okay.

[slg]

That is nice, but there is still intentionally misleading marketing fluff like this:

>Each rechargeable battery allows you to capture content for 5-8 flights, depending on the flight mode(s) selected. Rechargeable batteries can be swapped for easy use...

Why phrase it like that? That gives zero impression of what the actual battery life is because I have no idea what a "flight" means as a unit of measurement. Just tell us how much time it lasts.

[laptop-man]

I fly FPV drones, I have one very similar to that size. running a 1s 300mah lihv I get about 3 to 5 minutes. 5 minutes damages the battery. but the tiny lihv never liv long enough anyways.

I'd expect it to get close to that time, but it has so much more plastic around it. but then again it's not transmitting video.

[maaaaattttt]

They're probably too ashamed of the actual value in minutes...

Reminds me of some internal corporate presentations: when the numbers are good they show percentage increase and when they're bad the show absolute values, and when they're really bad they "forget" to give the time range of that absolute value...

[bastawhiz]

If you're using this for Snap, one "flight" is actually a pretty reasonable time unit. Snapchat videos can be a maximum of one minute.

[bigiain]

So far as I can tell there are no real spec numbers anywhere. No video size/framerate/resolultion specs I could find (admittedly I only spent 1 or 2 mins clicking around looking for them).

Which kinda indicates the target market they're gonna aim this at. This is for people who want to know "Can I upload the video to Snapchat?" not for people who are wondering "Is this 1080p? Or 720? Surely it can't be 4k?"

[bushbaba]

I have no idea on how many minutes it takes to get a photo. I personally like their metric choice.

[qq66]

The default flight is 30 seconds.

[natural219]

I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.

[pigtailgirl]

wobbly:

https://videos.ctfassets.net/svn43w404u4n/4oG6RAF5QALMWEBdlX...

[walrus01]

not just wobbly but what small drone enthusiasts call "jello", significantly lower video quality than like a $399 dji mini 2

it is cheap and non gimbal stabilized, so can't expect much more

[Thorrez]

Where is that video from?

[mygoodaccount]

sauce on this succubus?

[srcreigh]

Why isn't it trivial to cut out that noise?

is it 4 motors? especially with data about current RPMs of the motors, with a FFT and some adjustments, it should be pretty trivial to deafen the sound.

From my listening many motors are effectively pretty simple instruments with normal harmonics etc which are easy to model. I could be wrong though.

[meatmanek]

There's going to be a significant white noise component due to the turbulent airflow, which won't be as easy to cut out.

[bozhark]

The image stabilization is garbage

[ComradePhil]

> video quality you should expect

The video that they try to show as if out of the drone is heavily edited to make it look similar to the other camera that they have used. It is very likely that they used non-stock camera software in the drone to capture raw and post-process for this ad, which will most likely not be available to the public.

[sytelus]

There is probably a market for pocket drone that can carry iPhone and take selfie just like this.

[thinkmassive]

iPhone 12 mini weighs 135g, over half the 250g limit for mini-drones. It seems unfeasible for a pocket-size drone in the near future, unless the drone could pull power from the iPhone and not need its own battery.

Mavic Mini has a payload capacity around 180g, but it also has a nice camera already.

[kelnos]

I'd be pretty worried about an accident that damages my phone; I don't think I'd want something like that. But I wouldn't be surprised if some people do.

[hk__2]

The pocket drone needs a way to know where you are in order to direct the camera at you and come back at the end. Right now they do so by pairing the drone with your phone (I guess using Bluetooth).

[the_arun]

Isn't iPhone too heavy for drone to carry around photographing?

[sorry_outta_gas]

It also makes it seem more real and fun