The Dunning-Kruger effect: a bias wherein unskilled persons mistakenly overestimate their ability to accomplish a given task. After buzzing DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+ quadcopter drone around my driveway for about two minutes, I'm pretty sure I was its walking embodiment.

"This is easy!" I said, flying the expensive piece of equipment—on loan from DJI—around in a tight box. "And awesome!" I jammed the left stick forward and the drone rocketed skyward, shooting up to a hundred feet overhead without any apparent effort. Its little LEDs blinked happily at me as I rotated it around its central axis, surveying the neighborhood in stately fashion. As the machine turned, it beamed down 1080p video to my phone, showing me a Google Maps-eye view of myself standing in the driveway below.

I wanted to quickly pull the video off the drone and do a fast front page post—maybe something like, "Flying drones is totally easy even for someone with no experience!"—but the day was windy. The drone wobbled back and forth within about a two-meter box as I brought it back toward the ground. As it drifted toward one of the oak trees in my front yard, I froze up. The stupidity of taking the drone up for its maiden flight in high winds in my crowded front yard suddenly hit me, full force, and in the time it took for me to sort out that and bank away from the tree, I needed to move the right-hand stick backward—no, wait, forward, because I'd yawed it around and its front was toward me—no, wait, crap, which way is—

BZZZZZZTWHAP. In a horrifying time-stretched second that seemed to take about ten million years, I watched the drone strike branches and leaves, the props stop spinning, and the whole $1,299 contraption drop out of the sky like a lead parakeet, smashing into the sidewalk. The battery flew off in one direction and the integrated camera in another. There was a moment of absolute stillness.

"Aw…fudge," I said, mostly.

A short video showing what it's like to look through the smoothly stabilized lens of the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+.

Backing up a bit

Before we get into what happened next—and how even senior reviews editors should read the manual first—we need to dig into the subject of our review: the drone itself.

Specs at a glance: DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Layout Four-rotor (quadcopter) Weight 1180g Diagonal length 350mm Motors 4x 920kv brushless Max flight speed 15 meters/second Max ascent/descent speed 6 meter/second ascent, 2 meter/second descent Max rated flight time 25 minutes Flight control frequencies 5.728GHz?5.8GHz Video relay frequencies 2412-2462MHz Battery capacity 5200mAh Camera Gimbal-stabilized 14MP 140 degree FOV fixed lens (f/2.8) Price $1,299

DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+ is an updated version of the Phantom 2 Vision. It's a GPS-directed four-rotor quadcopter—more properly, it's a legitimate drone, since it is capable of semi-autonomous flight. In fact, other drones in the Phantom 2 family can operate entirely on preprogrammed waypoints without any direct control (a capability which DJI tells us the Vision+ will gain within a few weeks with a software update).

The selling point of the Vision+ is its built-in camera, mounted on a fully stabilized three-axis gimbal. During flight, the gimbal keeps the camera straight and level even while the drone shifts and banks; the camera can also be panned and tilted from the ground by using the DJI Vision app on an iOS or Android device.

Like its older Phantom 2 and Phantom 2 Vision siblings, the Vision+ uses GPS to figure out its position, altitude, and velocity. When you first turn the quadcopter on, it performs a brief self-test and then starts to listen for GPS satellite signals from the sky. Once it’s locked on to at least a half-dozen of them, it’s ready to fly in its semi-automated GPS mode. Flying in this mode—and though there are other flight modes you can enable, this is definitely what you want to be using—makes the Phantom 2 Vision+ behave like a fly-by-wire aircraft: you tell it to go "forward," and the drone decides what "forward" means and how best to head that way. When hovering without any control input, the drone has a certain cubic volume (about two meters on a side) that it will try to stay within no matter how bad the wind happens to be; in several hours of flight, we rarely encountered a situation where the drone strayed out of its little hover box. When it did, it was because something had screwed up its internal compass calibration.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson



Lee Hutchinson

You fly the drone through a dual-stick controller similar to what you’d use with any other remote-controlled aircraft. With fresh batteries and without obstructions, we found it to have an effective range of about a thousand feet in any direction (including straight up—we’re getting to that). The onboard camera relays its image in real-time over a separate radio channel to a separate transceiver perched on the remote; that transceiver in turn sets up a short-range Wi-Fi network to which you join your smart phone. Once this is done, you can see the camera’s relayed picture in the DJI app. It’s a little Rube Goldberg-y, but in practice it works perfectly—well enough to fly the drone via the camera’s video relay if it goes out of visual range. The app also shows you the drone’s distance, bearing, and altitude, which are all extremely useful for locating the thing in flight. You can control the camera from the ground but only along the tilt axis (though you can tilt the camera using your phone's internal accelerometers, which is neat). If you want to pan, you have to turn the whole drone.

The app eschews standard iOS typefaces and design standards, opting instead for a customized and clunky skin. It doesn't quite impair usability, but it definitely has the look of an application designed by engineers without much thought to how the interface should look.

Still, it's serviceable. The app lets you take stills and record video (both of which are stored locally on the drone’s microSD card—DJI provides owners with a 4GB card, but you can use whatever size you’d like) and adjust some basic image parameters like white balance and exposure. The camera’s max resolution for both still and moving images is 1080p; image quality for stills looks about like your average smart phone, with video quality being a little lower. It definitely doesn’t produce video that looks as good as a GoPro, but it’s perfectly serviceable for flying around and looking at stuff.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Of course, the big draw of the Phantom 2 Vision+ over DJI’s previous Phantom 2 Vision isn’t just the camera—the older model came with a camera, too—but the three-axis stabilized gimbal integrated into the camera. Unlike the drone’s predecessor, the Vision+ keeps the camera steady along all flight axes and produces butter-smooth video. Of course, if you prefer something with higher quality, you could purchase a Phantom 2 body (sans camera) along with a separate stabilized GoPro gimbal, but then you lose out on the end-to-end integration DJI’s system provides: that live video and telemetry relay requires yet more bolt-on parts if you want to do it yourself.

In a lot of ways, the Phantom 2 Vision+ is the opposite of the DIY quadcopter experience. I attended a meeting of a local drone piloting club, and most of the club members had homebuilt quadcopters of various levels of sophistication. A few folks had complex Arduino-based rigs with video relaying, but none of the homebuilt quadcopters had the straight out-of-the-box-just-works sophistication or functionality of the Vision+. The trade-off, of course, is price. You can get a decent DIY quadcopter built and flying for only a few hundred bucks if you’re not terribly choosy about the components. The Phantom 2 Vision+, on the other hand, costs $1,299. That’s the extra price for convenience.