Drone selection for beginners, some brief description here
Basic drones:
- Cheap quadcopter with Gyroscope and Accelerometer only.
- Pilot need to maintain the vertical altitude and horizontal position all the time, which is not easy.
- The tougher part is altitude control, which is the remote control left stick up/down handling in maintaining the altitude of drone. Most beginners will have the drones crash onto ceiling or keep dropping to ground. The beginners will give up of drone flying very soon.
- If you are capable of handling this, this will be very fun with all the drone racing and aerobatic stunts.
- Cheapest and most fun is JJRC H36 of about S$17 (variants are Eachine 010, Furibee F36 and etc). JJRC H36 not recommended for very new beginners, but recommended if you want to further training your drone manual flying skill.
Altitude hold drones:
- This drone is with altitude hold using barometers. The drone knows how to correct it's altitude error/drift by itself.
- The drone keeps it's altitude. Meaning if you leave the remote control's left stick at the center or untouched, the drone will hover at the same altitude height, until you move the left stick up/down.
- Altitude hold drone is much easier for beginner to fly, beginner normally only need to take care of the horizontal position drifting of drone (the drone will slowly drift horizontally in any direction as there is no position hold). Beginner will only need to push the drone horizontally back a bit once it has drifted to too far or hitting something.
- Note that it is important to buy this type of drone came with remote control (gamepad, joystick commonly called "transmitter") and not controlled by handphone. Beginners will have difficulties controlling these drones by handphone.
- Example Altitude hold drones: Syma X21
Position hold drones, Optical positioning type:
- All position hold drones will have altitude hold/barometer already built in. In addition, optical positioning drone will have horizontal positioning capability. Meaning if the drone pilot leaves both the control sticks (of remote control transmitter) at the center untouched, the drone will hover at the same spot in the air. The drone knows how to correct both it's vertical altitude error and horizontal position error/drift.
- I'm suggesting these type of drones for beginners. It is much easier to fly. If you leave both the remote control sticks untouched, the drone will hover right at the same spot in the air.
- It is quite OK to have handphone control for these type of drone. These drones are very stable and seldom drift.
- Optical positioning has operational limits of up to about 5m height maximum.
- Example Optical positioning drones: XK-X150, Rova Selfie, DJI Tello/Spark/Mavic, Yuneec Breeze, Mi Drone 4K
Position hold drones, GPS positioning type:
- These drone has the horizontal positioning sensing by GPS. The drone will try to stay at some fixed horizontal location (horizontal position error correction) using GPS.
- You cannot received reliable GPS indoor, so all these GPS drones are mainly for outdoor flying. And with GPS, the drones can have auto-pilot capabilities like "return to home", "orbiting", "way points", and "follow me"
- GPS has ~1m of position error, and there are other problems of low GPS data feed (5-10 per sec), and poor reception. Together with windy Singapore outdoor environment, these GPS errors sometimes might cause the drones to "swing/circle" around one fixed point instead of locking steadily to that GPS point. In other words, these drones sometimes could sway to quite far apart even in GPS position hold. So for beginners it is better to have remote control for GPS drone. Do not use handphone to control GPS drones as you do not have enough time to react.
- Example GPS drones: Hubsan 501x/502x, DJI Spark/Mavic, Yuneec Breeze, Mi Drone 4K, C-Me Selfie. Note that DJI Spark/Mavic, Yuneec Breeze, Mi Drone 4K have both GPS and Optical positioning sensors.
Wifi controlled drones, and it's limitation:
- Wifi has it's own problem of communication overhead, congestion and lower transmission power limit.
- if you are using handphone to control the drone, you will have higher chances of slow reaction and drone crashes onto something.
- Only use handphone to control those very stable drones, for e.g. DJI Tello, DJi Spark, Yuneec Breeze. For other Wifi drones you have to be more skillful and not for beginners.
Indoor drones:
- For flying indoor, the drone has to be small (90mm motors distance diagonally, or smaller)
- Optical positioning preferred, and GPS will not work indoor.
- Indoor drones will have problem flying in the windy outdoor environment here.
- Example Indoor drones: DJI Tello, XK X150
Outdoor drones:
- For flying outdoor, you need to have powerful brushless motors and larger propeller size of 3"
- Optical positioning sensors will work for altitude up to few meters. Beyond that you need GPS.
- For drones with handphone Wifi as remote control or video display, you have flying range of 50m away.
- For drones with some proprietary remote control and video display transmission, you have flying range of up to few km away.
- Example outdoor drones with brushless motors: Hubsan 501x, DJI Spark/Mavic, Yuneec Breeze, Mi Drone 4K, Bebop 2.
FPV drones:
- FPV drones are video-piloting, meaning you are looking at video feed when flying (camera is installed on the drone), and flying like as if you are sitting at the cockpit of the drone.
- Most FPV drones are racing drones without altitude and position hold. So for beginner it is not advisable to get FPV drones as this is difficult to fly (this is not like computer simulation games).
- Beginners should get a JJRC H36 first to train your own skill. And move on to FPV drones later, or simply mount a tiny camera onto your JJRC H36.
Selfie Drones:
- For selfie photos purpose, need to get drones with at least some 5-12MP camera.
- I think these drones are producing good quality photos, and non-fisheye: DJI tello, C-Me selfie, Rova Selfie.
- For any drones with fisheye camera, you need to de-fish the photo on desktop computers (meaning digitally correcting the lens distortion on desktop computers). All hubsan drones are "fisheye"
Video Drones:
- For any video drone, better make sure it has a MicroSD slot on the drone. DJI tello's video is recorded on handphone through Wifi. Recorded video has problem of low bit-rate, drop frames, and some "mosaic-effect".
- For Yuneec Breeze, you need to perform additional video stabilizing processing on desktop as the drone does not have powerful electronic image stabilizing.
- For Bebop 2, it does not have mechanical gimbal so you should expect the video to be slightly more blur.
- For cinematic videos producing, need to get at least a dji spark, dji mavic or xiaomi mi drone 4K. Mechanical gimbal is a must have.
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There are other things to consider like size, reliability, durable, flight time, battery parts, 3rd party apps, repair, etc and I'm not going to describe here.
Due to the limitation in airborne weight, and product price, there is no single drone that could cover all the features you wish. And you just have to make the selection based on price/performance. For beginners' very first drone, I would suggest XK-X150, Hubsan H216A, DJI Tello or Yuneec Breeze.
It is very hard to hit the bull's eye and get the drone you like from your very first purchase. Suggestion is to buy something cheap first, and purchase "that right one" after you understand drones limitations, capabilities, features and also understanding your own needs. You might pay for the expensive S$2K MavicPro/Phantom4 in your first buy but later found out not many places to fly those powerful drones in S'pore,... and ended with a second buy of S$17 JJRC H36 having so fun of flying it indoor anytime.
My dream drone as dji tello with MicroSD slot.... but real dji tello got no MicroSD slot.