Hot on the heels of the GoPro Karma announcement, DJI releases the new Mavic Pro personal drone. With a built in 4K camera and stabilizer at the same price as the Karma but about 1/3 the size, it looks like a pretty good deal.
The Mavic Pro folds down to as small as a water bottle and will fly up to 40 mph for as long as 27 minutes. You can fly the drone either from your phone (via Wi-Fi) or from the remote control — the remote control has a range of 4.3 miles and gives you an HD live stream of the action. The drone has a built-in obstacle avoidance system that can detect things in its flight path up to 49 feet or 15 meters away and automatically course corrects.
High-precision 3-axis mechanical camera stabilization (gimbal) ensures you get clear photos (12-megapixel camera with Adobe DNG RAW support) and video (4K at 30fps).
The ActiveTrack feature enables you to tell the drone who to follow, and it handles the rest. It can either trace the subject from behind, front, or make a circle around; fly alongside the person; or keep the camera focused on the person while you fly it around.
Gesture Mode lets you take the ultimate drone selfie — when you have the drone flying and camera facing you simply make a gesture and it will snap a photo. Probably one of the coolest features for those not familiar with using joysticks all the time, TapFly means you can just tap where you want to go and the Mavic Pro will fly smoothly in that direction so you can focus on controlling the gimbal and capturing photos and video.
DJI’s Mavic Pro retails for $999 and is available for pre-order now — official release is October 15th.