Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We recently bought a drone on impulse. It was less than an ideal experience, but it taught me a few lessons. What do I really want? A decent flight experience starts with GPS and stability controls, or “gravity” sensors. Good cameras and image stabilization is great too for those fun arial photographs. It’s not a necessity, but if you get a lower quality camera and try to take video or photos the pictures are going to be grainy. Also, for photos I wanted a sd/tf card slot on the drone. Without the onboard storage the images must be transmitted back to the phone, which reduces quality (generally). Brushless motors are a huge plus. They seem a little quieter but most important they are speed controlled and allow more precise control of the motor. Previous drones, I had tended to have a lot of issues with motors differing in power. Anyway, after reading reviews and articles for days I bought the HS 175D and it does what it says it does. The drone comes set to beginner mode. This limits you to 98 ft height and radius. This is a good thing. It gives you some time to figure the thing out. From the first takeoff the drone was rock solid. It’s pretty amazing really, the controls are simple and the video screen offers an HD real time video that is crisp and fluid. After a short experiment I let my 11yo fly and he had no difficulty maneuvering the drone around buildings in the yard. The camera only has one adjustment for angle, but you don’t need more. It’s really easy to acquire a great photo. After a couple of days, we took off beginner mode and flew the drone up to 260 ft. I’m sure it would go higher. But it’s barely visible at that distance, I was nervous since there was a slight breeze, it held its position and responded quickly to the controls. We pivoted the camera took photos and loved the experience. We then brought it back down perfectly to where we started. After a week of use we learned an important lesson. Follow the calibration steps and if you are flying outdoors and do NOT fly without gps lock. The return home feature depends on the gps lock before flight. Otherwise if get gps lock after you take off no telling where “home” will be. This bit us twice. Once we used return home and the drone headed into the woods where it crashed. No harm done though. The second was when the “low battery return to home” feature engaged. We had launched before gps lock, and the drone headed off toward the street. I was able to bring it down, but it didn’t follow commands to land. I strongly suggest never flying without gps lock unless you force the drone into optical mode. There is a warning that pops up on the screen so kudos for the designer reminding me about gps. But it’s not clear what dismissing the warning will do. With no “home” properly set it creates unpredictable behaviors. It’s my mistake, in wanting to get flying right away I ignored the warning. So learn from my mistake and save yourself a crash. All that said, we have had a few crashes, well 3. The two caused by failing to set home and one from flying into the roof of a shed. The propellors are scratched up a bit but it still works flawlessly. We are super happy with the drone and would recommend it. It’s a little spendy for a beginner drone but packed with great features, the company has been around for a while and parts are readily available. Sooner or later may need to buy parts, so knowing you can get them is a big plus. <edit> We have had a bit of time to learn more about this drone and still love it. We have still usually keep it on 50% speed which is quite fast for us. I flew it around some on 100% and it’s fast. Close to 20mph at best guess. So, for the novice or intermediate I recommend staying at 50%. I will say we did encounter some learnings on the way. ALSO, I reiterate, make sure you have that gps lock before takeoff. Otherwise, if you encounter a return to home situation from low battery or whatever you don’t get a nasty surprise with the drone heading off to who knows where. That happened to us. Fortunately, we were able to still land it safely. The app warns you that you are not in gps mode so this should never be a surprise. After the third time we finally learned our lesson. Another thing is that you really don’t want to encounter the low battery return home. If you are not in a clear area. The instructions state it can’t avoid obstacles and it’s not kidding. The drone will fly up to 50-70 feet or so then head straight home fast. If it encounters anything on the way that isn’t going to end well. I recommend a timer of about 15-17 minutes per battery. The batteries easily last 20 for us but if you limit yourself to 15 minutes you don’t get any surprises. We are still on our first set of props, and have trimmed a few tree leaves and branches along the way. The drone still files so well. One thing I’m impressed about is if one of us does fly into a tree the drone doesn’t crash. It will fall through branches and recover itself! If you are paying attention you can fly it back out of the tree. Another huge plus is that customer service chat is available right in the app. We encountered an issue with calibration once after an encounter with a tree. The customer service helped us out right away. There is a bit of a language barrier, it was obvious our agent was not a native English speaker. But to get someone to help us right away was fantastic. For that reason alone when I buy my next drone it will be from HS