The DJI Avata is something special. I knew it the very first time I flew.
I pressed three power buttons, placed a drone on a table, pulled goggles over my eyes, and grabbed the pistol-shaped wand. A double-tap and a long-press of a cherry red button got the bird into the air. And then, with a squeeze of my index finger and a literal flick of the wrist, I was a bird, a plane, Superman taking off into the sky, swooping down to the Earth below, skimming across a field of grass so close I could almost taste it, banking in a turn so smooth and level it felt like a car being professionally drifted around a bend.
I couldn’t wait to go again. And I didn’t have to — there was plenty of battery left.
Today, DJI is announcing the Avata, its first cinewhoop-style drone. It’s not like any flying camera DJI has made before. Instead of folding arms like a Mavic or Mini, it’s outfitted from the factory with a full propeller guard, four fixed rotors that push straight down, and integrated feet barely tall enough to keep those propellers out of trouble. Instead of a three-axis gimbal and collision avoidance sensors to allow it to fly and film in most any direction, the expectation is you’ll be flying this drone forward like a plane, and you’ll have a first-person view of where it’s going through its 1/1.7-inch, 4K / 60fps or up to 2.7K / 120fps camera. The only sensors you get are a pair of downward-facing cameras and infrared sensors, which do an amazing job maintaining a constant altitude while zooming just above the ground.
But if it’s a cinewhoop, it’s not your average cinewhoop, either. You get 18 minutes of battery life, several times what you generally see from the kind of acrobatic drone you might fly through a bowling alley. And it’s not exceptionally light or small: it’s roughly the size of a Mini 2 with its arms extended but weighs almost twice as much at 410 grams, meaning you may need to register and label your drone, and it’ll hit harder in a crash. On the plus side, it doesn’t have any exposed propellers or arms to break like the original DJI FPV.
The biggest difference, though, is that the Avata is not primarily intended to be paired with the traditional, joystick-based controller that lets you fly a drone sideways or backward or do flips and rolls. DJI won’t sell you a kit with one and couldn’t send us one in time for testing. When we tried the one that came with the $1,299 DJI FPV — which DJI does advertise as being able to push the Avata into a full manual acrobatic mode capable of flying 60 miles per hour (27 meters per second) — we couldn’t get it to stay paired reliably.
DJI Avata pricing
Item | Price |
---|---|
Item | Price |
DJI Avata | $629 |
DJI Avata Pro-View Combo (DJI Goggles 2, Motion Controller) | $1,388 |
DJI Avata Fly Smart Combo (DJI FPV Goggles V2, Motion Controller) | $1,168 |
DJI Avata Fly… |
Read More: The new DJI Avata let me swoop and soar like no beginner drone I’ve used before