I ran across this video today. Impressive.

https://www.lily.camera/?utm_source=...FYY8gQodnjcAmw

Looks like a cool little gadget if it actually hits the market.

Actually I have seen quite a few "concept" quadcopters being offered for "presale". But honestly, there is a whole lot of salesmanship hype attached to this stuff to consider buying something until it's actually hit the marketplace and actual purchasers post REAL reviews and REAL video from them. I was looking hard at a product from a company called Yuneec that sounded good on paper, but come to find out that their supposed 1080P video was nothing more than 720P upscaled by the quad's processor. So it had some terrible aliasing artifacts. The company has been talking about a 4K version, but I'm betting it will only be upscaled 4K. But at least the 1080P will likely be decent then.

There is a new unit about to hit the market from 3DRobotics called the Solo that looks pretty darn interesting. And DJI just introduced a new model of their Phantom line.

Still hearing rumors that GoPro is developing their own quadcopter, but haven't seen anything concrete about that one yet.

This field is still very young, and the pioneer buyers are pretty apt to have a bunch of arrows sticking out of their backs by buying in too soon. A lot of products are going to be sold way before they are actually ready for prime time. I would have REALLY liked to have had a capable unit in my hands by the first of this month, but that just did not happen.

Oh, and as for that GoPro Hero4 Black I bought, so far I'm pretty impressed with this little critter. Seems to do a real good job with everything I've been trying with it, so far. Time lapse seems to work real well, and right now I'm playing around with something they call "night lapse" to see how that works. Honestly I'm glad I got that touch screen back pac for it, as I can't see that it would be very useful to me without it.

Yeah, I really expected to see a $2000.00 and up price tag on this one when I first saw the video. My brother is supposed to be getting to try one out so we'll see. I'll keep you posted if he does.

I discovered a neat feature of the Hero 4 Black that I didn't realize I would be getting with the package. The camera can be set up as a dash cam that runs in a continual loop, overriding the older "footage" when the ram card runs out of room. These dash cam things seem to be very popular in Europe, and I can see where using one would be well worthwhile considering as helping in case of an accident to show what actually happened. Could save your butt in a case of your word against someone else's to determine liability.

Yeah, and if yours is like mine, you can select (from a list) the amount of
recording time before it "loops". But you have to remember to stop recording
manually if you would like to preserve the recording. Neat little buggers,
though!
Andy

I've heard rumors that a Hero5 will be released sometime soon. Still not seeing prices on the Hero4 dropping very much, though. Still some features I haven't tried out on the one I've got. Took a stab at the night lapse feature but apparently you need zero light to get a good star field to show up. When I tried it the moon came up in the early AM and washed out the view.

Did a lot of time lapse using 4K that seems to work well. We were down at Sanibel for the entire month of June and I had access to the roof, so I had the GoPro and my Panasonics running almost every day. There was a spectacular lightning storm one night but I think I screwed up the settings on the GoPro, and not sure how well that turned out. Haven't had a chance to actually review the videos at full size.

But yeah, I'm pretty impressed with this little camcorder. :thumbsup:

Now if I could just find a decent and reliable quadcopter platform that I don't have to worry about it running back to China with my GoPro or dropping it all into the Gulf of Mexico............

Hey, you're a fisherman..........right?
Take one of your fishing rods and hook the leader up to the quad. If it goes
down, reel it in or follow the monofilament to where the quad is. :lmao:
Seriously, disappearing over the horizon is one of the bigger fears I have
with the quadcopters.............. Lotsa bucks to watch disappear, and you
just KNOW that whoever finds the thing AIN'T gonna waste any time on
trying to find the owner! WHOO-HOO! Finders keepers! The quad might be
unusable without the transmitter, but I'll take a free GoPro any day! :thumbsup:
Andy

Yeah, that sounds like a decent idea. But I think they will get the kinks ironed out sooner or later. The problems sound like programming issues to me, so it's just a matter of debugging the beta test code that is being sent out to the first lines of buyers. These are not the sort of things you want to be the first on your block to own. :nonod:

I can't think of a single solitary item that I would be willing to spend $2,000 or so on that has the potential to just fly away into the sunset, never to be seen again. I don't think I'm particularly a cheap skate, but I would like to think I'm not stone stupid, neither.

And how do you protect against someone else having a transmitter with
more power than yours, and just using that brute force to steal your quad?
I can tell you that I would be more than just a little pizzed off if someone were
to hijack something I owned! That's gotta be an up and coming theft item...
Andy :wavey:

I'm not sure all quads work this way, but I believe that the process of connecting the quad to the controller uses an encrypted handshaking process in order to prevent that sort of thing from happening. That's why multiple people using the same model of quad can fly on the same field without a conflict. I believe this holds true for RC fixed wing and helicopters as well.

Now, that's not to say that someone couldn't purposely hack a controller to be able to do something like that, though. :shrug01: