Our New Drone Camera: DJI Ryze Tello :)

In spite of my apprehensions and my assurances (foremost to myself), I just couldn’t resist the temptation to buy a Drone camera, especially at this attractive price. So bought the DJI Ryze Tello 🙂 Here is our drone hovering steadily in the air –

In short, I am in love with this new toy 😀

That, in spite of not being able to figure out how to make the Tello app store the streamed photos and videos it takes, in my cell phone for one whole week. It turned out that the app was initially asking permission to utilise the storage and GPS but I (many before me too) didn’t notice it as the notification went away too quickly. I had to reinstall the app several times before my fingers became fast enough to click yes to both the required permissions within 1-second!!

I like how they’ve designed the control and operation of this drone (via the cell phone screen and mobile app) – it’s very impressive for a “toy” drone. Getting used to the piloting of the drone takes some practice. But the controls and the way the drone is responding to the controls are very impressive. The best thing about this drone is, once it is comfortable with the environment (good lighting, mainly) it can hover over the air steadily like a helicopter.

This one doesn’t come with a gaming-type remote, hence all controls are on the touch screen of the mobile. That is a limitation, but it seems to be OK as we crashed it just twice or thrice till now 😉

The drone takes crashes quite impressively. It stops and falls down if crashed, but once we switch it on again, it takes off without any regrets. In fact, one of the fans flew away during one of our crashes. We just reattached it on the motor and it took off within the next few seconds.

The quality of the 720p videos it takes is not good, but it’s not bad either. The photos are slightly better. Actually, both are quite good in daylight. In indoors, which is where we want to fly the drone for the most part, there are visible grains. Fortunately, I can do some post processing to make it look better. Here is a video we shot with our drone at a blogger friend’s wedding reception –

 

Not bad for a small personal toy drone, no? Yes, the footage did go though post processing.

Altogether, even though I cannot use this drone camera to get professionally usable footage, I can at least insert a few seconds of ‘alternate perspective’ photos and videos. I think it will satisfy that purpose quite well. Of course, we can also use it to scene-puttify, which will be our main application 😀 😛 😀

Destination Infinity 

PS: BTW, we took a selfie with ‘Comedy Time’ Archana in the above-mentioned marriage reception. Here it is.