(upbeat music)
- [Sean] The Skydio 2 is not your typical drone.
This drone flies itself and is practically crash-proof.
It can follow you down a trail automatically dodging trees
because it's always mapping out the world
with six fish-eye cams.
The company says that three year olds can fly this drone,
and it's kinda true.
- I flew it away.
It went away.
Gone.
I did it.
- But you're not gonna be buying this $999 drone
for your three year old, who isn't actually four.
Instead of diving into every single feature of this drone,
we're gonna do things a little bit differently.
We're testing with three different people who wanna use
drones in ways they've been afraid to use them before.
First there's Felicia.
She's a novice who's never flown a drone in her life.
I'll go second.
I'm more of a drone hobbyist and I've always wanted
a flying camera that could follow me around.
Lastly, there's Vjeran.
He's a pro who's rarely seen without a drone on his back.
- Right out the gate, I had some choices to make.
There's a bunch of different ways to fly this drone.
With your phone, a beacon, a phone-beacon combo
or the new Skydio controller.
Set-up took longer than i expected,
there's a lot of syncing involved.
I flew it with the controller for the first time.
It took me a second to get the controls right,
so what ended up happening is it went over a bunch of people
and they started panicking, and I started panicking,
and I feel better with it now, I just,
I was, it was not fun.
I was so nervous, really nervous.
But I spent another 10 minutes or so with the controller
and was able to get some nice footage like this.
I flew the drone over a broken pier to get
closer to the boats, until I was attacked by seagulls.
- [Sean] You want me to take over?
- Yes, please.
I panicked the seagulls freaked me out.
And then we came over here to use the wand.
Which I was convinced was gonna be way easier but actually
I found to be a little more stressful because
I didn't feel like I had as much control over the drone
when people and water and things happened,
I didn't feel confident that I could fix it,
so I actually found that the wand was easier to use
but a little bit more stressful overall.
For my first few flights, I wanted to see if you can fly
the Skydio 2 with little to no instruction,
which I did but I had a feeling the drone
can do a lot more and it can.
There are a number of built in modes like dronies
and cinematic tracking shots.
It's honestly not that intuitive.
All the automated features hide behind menus
but once you figure out how to use them,
you can do some pretty cool things.
I liked controlling the drone with the phone versus
either of the optional controllers.
Once I had more time in the air I definitely felt
more comfortable flying it and even started having fun.
I trusted the drone enough to take it off and land it on
my hands and never felt like I was gonna crash the thing.
My only wish is that the Skydio 2 had a panic button
that would bring the drone back to me safely
away from people for those moments when I felt
like I was just in a bit over my head.
- First, let me show you this gorgeous clip
of some doofus on a scooter.
So you can see what the Skydio is like at its best.
This is tracking me with Skydio's cameras alone.
Notice it's ducking under trees
and swooping around branches.
Next, I gave it a tougher challenge going full speed
on my bicycle, taking Skydio's
range-extending GPS beacon along for the ride.
I love that it let the drone come find me even when
I thought I'd left it in the dust,
but the footage wasn't always as dynamic as I'd like.
I imagined myself diving through trees with the skydio,
but the drone would sometimes just go around and see here
how it looks like the drone's totally lost me.
This is a weird quirk.
The Skydio's still tracking me
but the camera's pointed the wrong way.
Though the Skydio did eventually turn around
and find me again.
And look at this.
I was super impressed with this footage of the drone
following me under a bridge.
I felt like I needed that beacon.
Without it, Skydio's cameras
just couldn't keep up with my bike.
Here's the same path you saw me take
with the beacon without it.
Time after time, the drone got stuck behind foliage.
You could drive a small truck through no problem.
This drone just does not wanna hurt itself.
Even when I was manually piloting it,
the Skydio 2 refused to fly through some spaces
I'd have no trouble flying a regular drone.
But the Skydio 2 isn't smart enough to stay out of trouble.
Here's the moment it decided to fly over someone's
private property for a no particularly good reason.
Here's the moment I realized a train might be about
to pancake this drone and no easy way to stop it.
And here's the moment it freaked out in downtown
San Francisco and nearly electrocuted itself.
But the main reason I'm not buying Skydio right now
is the rough, unfinished software.
It always takes way too long to get it up in the air,
whether it's a failed WiFi link,
waiting ages for a GPS lock, or one of the weird glitches
where the controller refuses to connect.
And why?
Even though the Skydio knows how to find a safe landing zone
by itself, will it crash if you manually
tell it to land on safely?
- All right, it's camera time.
So let's address the elephant in the room right?
This drone is supposed to compete with DJI flagship drones
but it has a lot smaller sensor.
So it's not really a fair comparison.
Compared to the original Skydio, the Skydio R1,
this is a massive leap forward but that is a low low bar.
compared to the other drones that use the similar size
sensor, you pretty much know what to expect.
Crisp 4K footage and some noise.
Skydio does have some of its own limitations.
For one, you can only film in one color profile mode.
There's nothing like a flat center-like profile which
usually gives you a little bit more room for coloring.
You can even adjust that one standard profile that you have
but if that's what you want,
you'll be pleased with the overall results.
The colors look accurate, white balance is on point
like 99% of the time and overall in sharpness, it's great
as long as you're shooting a very low ISO: 100, 200.
Here are a few clips I filmed in a fairly well lit warehouse
where I still have to crank up the ISO to 400 and 800
and I'm not really a fan of what I got here.
Skydio also shoots in HDR.
It looks better than some of the other HDR modes
that I've tried out like Parrot anafi
meaning it's not as aggressive but to me I see more changes
in color rather than in exposure and those color
changes often look a bit too saturated and unreal.
All right, let's move on to photos.
The JPEG that you get out of this drone,
they look pretty good.
There's not a lot of chromatic aberration
just look fairly sharp.
The only issue is again with the noise
that starts creeping in as you keep raising the ISO.
Basically, anything above 100 ISO looks pretty noisy to me.
It's still usable and looks fine on smaller screens.
So y'all Instagramers will be pleased.
You'll be happy to know that you can shoot RAW photos,
which gives you a bit more flexibility in editing.
But I feel like there's one thing missing
which is more photos specific mode.
Stuff like 360 spherical photos or vertical photos
or 180 panoramas.
Maybe next year, or in the next update.
As we have established before
there are four ways of flying this drone.
My preferred way is flying it with the controller.
It's just what I'm used to and it gives me more control
to get that cinematic footage that I want.
This controller right here,
it's the very same controller that you get with Parrot anafi
and I never liked it.
I still don't.
It feels bulkier than it needs to be
and some of the buttons don't actually do much.
It all feels just a bit unfinished.
Oh, on top of all one of the joysticks broke in Felicia's
backpack, so yep, still not loving this controller.
Okay, let's move on to the app.
The Skydio app is fairly straightforward,
maybe a bit too straightforward for my liking,
there's no way to quickly glance at it
to check your settings without opening a separate menu
which then covers most of your screen.
And there's no way to tell distance and the height
of the drone, which is why
I can't tell you exact range numbers.
Skydio promises around two miles of range
in perfect conditions and I definitely
didn't get anywhere close to that.
Plus the transmission quality is nowhere near DJI's.
The video feeds get choppy and pixelated even when
you can still easily spot the drone with your naked eye
which you definitely should because that's how
you're legally supposed to fly your drone.
But my overall flying experience was pretty good.
The drone behaves well in the air,
it has nice smooth acceleration and can slow down quickly
if it senses an obstacle.
I can see myself using this drone instead of the Mavic 2
for specific tracking features, like this shot right here.
But still, flying this drone straight into a building and
hoping it will avoid it is a scariest way to fly a drone.
It's definitely a surreal kind of frightening feeling,
which I didn't enjoy at times.
Like right here.
I was so damn nervous I was going to crash the drone
or worse hurt someone but Skydio handled it well.
I do wish there was some visual indication
on the screen telling you, okay, I see the thing.
And you're good, I'll avoid it.
Skydio made some clear choices which point towards
who they're tryna score
and I don't think I'm in that targeted audience.
You will get some nice looking footage from this drone.
And you can get tracking shots which no other drone
can get unless you're really exceptional at flying.
But if you wanna have full control over your flying
and you're filming, this drone probably isn't for you.
And finally, I wanna spend a second
talking about the built of this thing.
I think it looks really nice.
Materials look solid, the gimbal feels robust.
It is exposed however, so in case you do crash this thing,
it's probably gonna get damaged.
But this drone isn't gonna crash, right?
- Skydio can do things no other drone can.
We flew it in and around trees and obstacles for hours,
and we only managed to crash it by landing on a bad surface.
It's a drone, an absolute beginner can learn to fly
without fear, even if there are too many ways to control it.
And none of them are terribly intuitive.
It can be your self-flying camera with caveats,
and it could get a professional some shots
they can't get any other way
if they're satisfied with the image quality.
We just also get the sense
this self-flying drone vision isn't quite complete.
Maybe there's something better like a Skydio 2 pro perhaps
or a Skydio 3.
If you wanna know more about the Skydio 2's tech, specs,
or how it was made, check out our hands on video that we
filmed at their headquarters in Mountain View, California.
They build and test it right there.