Re: GoPro enters the drone market -- is our hobby growing up
I agree, it's about photography. R/C (for me, for 40 years) used to be about the building and the flying. That's kind of boring these days. Now, for me, it's about the photography. That's why it pisses me off so much that DJI would put a fragile POS camera/gimble with mediocre video performance on a $1200 radio-controlled flying machine that by its very nature is subject to trees and ground, random puffs of air, and niggling electronic gremlins. And then...$679 to replace the component that represents the primary reason for flying the thing in the first place? And then making it poorly enough that it's lucky to survive the inevitable crash? Seriously? That would not seem to customer-oriented engineering and marketing.
I wanted FPV for this new aspect of my R/C career. I know how to use a soldering iron and certainly am no stranger to modifying model aircraft electronics, but the flying and the photography was the aspect of the hobby that I wanted to focus on, not the modifying, building or re-building so I elected to go with the P2V+ for my initial foray into drone photography. I haven't broken it yet, but reading all these online forums, I'm apprehensive about it.
My suspicion is that given the ready availability of companies putting together the electronics and systems necessary to build a viable drone, GoPro would have no trouble acquiring the components and expertise to market a very serviceable drone, and I suspect that if and when they do, it will be able to take a beating, unlike the Vision +, it appears.
So yeah, I'm really rooting for GoPro.
