After covering the compact Mavic Pro drone we have yet another one to review. And that should be surprise. Christmas is in less than one week and a drone could easily be the best Christmas gift for any guy.
In this blog, I am going to discuss whether or not the standard edition DJI Phantom 3 (P3) is still worth picking up as we head into 2018. It’s an older model now, but does that make it irrelevant? Let’s get straight into it and see if we can answer that question for you.
Getting right into it, there are two reasons why people buy drones; either to use them as cameras or just fly around and have fun with. While you can fly the P3 around and have fun with it, its main purpose is to be used as a camera. Due to that it features a camera that can zoom in up to 2.7K. It also has a three-axis gimbal which helps make all footage look nice and stable. Despite being the standard edition of DJI’s Phantom 3 drone lineup, this thing is still incredibly capable.
23 minutes of flight time
The 4,480 milliamp power battery that the P3 comes with is expected to around 23 minutes of flight time. We’ve been experiencing about 21 minutes, but really it depends on what you are actually doing with the drone. If you are flying along at top speed you are likely to drain the battery quicker. That’s because you’re putting more strain on the motor.
Controller
The controller the standard P3 comes with is good enough. It does, however, lack a few buttons that the Pro level controllers have. But they can be controlled from the DJI Go app on your smartphone. What the controller has is two sticks. One that controls lift as well as rotation, and another that just controls the direction. Directly below them is the on/off switch. When toggled to the on position shows you how much controller power you have left.
On the top left of the controller there is a 3-way switch called S2. And on the top right side of the controller is another switch called S1. Without going into too much detail here, these switches effectively just change the flight modes. On the top left side of the controller, there is a wheel that controls the up-and-down movement of the camera. The last thing about the controller is the clip that holds your phone. The P3 isn’t designed to hold a larger device such as a tablet, it only holds phones.
Speaking of your phone, DJI provides an app called “DJI Go” that you can connect to with your smartphone to see what your journey is doing. It also gives you access to multiple settings that the drone has.
Weight and Speed
The drone itself with the battery and props on weighs 1,216 grams. The standard P3 also has a maximum ascent speed of 3 meters per second. Max descent speed is also 3 meters per second. This model also has a max speed of 36 MPH.
Buying DJI P3 in 2018
Now that I have talked about what the drone can do it’s time to answer the question: Is this drone worth buying going into 2018? Well, given the cost of the device and what it is actually capable of doing, I’d say that the DJI Phantom 3 is actually well worth it. When the Phantom 3 came out in January 2013, it was actually quite expensive. But now almost 5 years later it can be found for about $500 USD. That still sounds like a lot of money but compared to DJI’s other drones like the Phantom 4 series and the Mavic, it’s actually quite well priced.
Even though the standard Phantom 3s are an older device by today’s standards, they are still really a very capable device. They might lack some of the features of the newer DJI drones have. But they are probably the best and easiest way to get into drone flying. So, if you’re looking for a decent drone that can get good aerial shots and take some pretty decent video footage, I’d say that the P3 is definitely worth picking up.
Keep in mind that if you are coming up short in the money department to pick one of these up, you can also check into SellBroke.com and see what you have to sell to them to earn a bit of extra spending money.
