This summer
I had the opportunity to fly a Spark drone for a while and I want to share my
experience in this post. First, not all the footage is shot by me, but
with the permission of the owner, I made a short video posted on youtube in
order to show the versatility, video quality and light handling of this small
semi-pro drone.
All this
time I was flying the drone I felt like I was missing much of the beauty around
us but the overall handling had glitches and left me with a mixed taste of
feelings, but let's take it from the start.
The small
package containing the drone, the controller and some batteries is the
essential tool in order to fly and have some fun with the drone and why not,
take some beautiful footage and photos from high angles to see the world as
never before. The Spark is small and takes off from anywhere, even from
the palm of your hand. Do not try to fly it from the ground if high winds
are present or you will find it upside down before it takes some height.
In other aspects,
we could not fly the spark over 500m far from us because of high interference
in the 2.4 Ghz band. We tried changing many channels, but the result
remained the same. This is one of the negative aspects that is expected
to find a solution with the use of the 5 Ghz band, maybe in some next versions.
The Spark
cannot be easily broken. It flipped on its top while taking off from
ground level because of a high burst of air, but overall it handles windy
conditions with admirable ease. Footage is always clear and stabilized,
pleasantly oversaturated and with enough details for 1080p recording.
The
automated panning functions did not work as expected and we terminated some of
them in fear of abnormal behavior. I felt like a manual approach would
result in better panning speed, but someone has to get used to the controls
first to achieve good results.
The flying time was also too short for
anything "professional" and we had to interrupt the shooting to get
the drone back and change battery two times. This left me with a bitter
taste as when we were just ready to shoot some carts in fast lap at the
local cart track in Kalamata the spark indicated that we would not be able to
shoot the length we expected as the battery was down to 15%. At the time
we took to bring it down and change battery, the moment was gone.
You can see
the video mix from this attempt and other footage in this youtube link.
There has
been some improvement in some of these aspects in the semi-pro category (Mavic
2) update. The flight distance is now longer, the flight time is also
longer, there has been some waterproofing (imagine casual and heavy rain, but
not water dipping), the shell has been tougher and the image quality brought up
to professional levels together with its price.
