It can capture video at 1080p full-HD resolution; the AR.Drone 2.0 is limited to 720p. Video is recorded to the Bebop's 8GB of internal storage (there's no microSD or SD card slot) in MP4 format. Photos can be captured in JPEGs or Adobe DNG raw format.
The device is a half-way house between a drone designed for carrying a large camera, such as those often used in TV shows like Top Gear and the toy drones intended to entertain. A “prosumer drone”, it lands at the fun end of the scale, very much for those looking to make home movies rather than television documentaries, but that’s no bad thing.
The new drone from Parrot, the French Bluetooth specialist, looks like almost any other quadrocopter. It has for exposed propellers on four extended arms that surround a tube-like body. The arms attach to an under plate, which supports a polystyrene body containing the camera and a tray for the battery on rubber buffers that help neutralise vibration.
For indoor flight there are two 10g clip-on polystyrene shells that are designed to protect the drone from walls - and the walls from the drone. They attach easily but a couple of crashes left marks on the wall and chunks cut out of the shells by the blades. The drone kept working just fine, though, even with a near full speed head-on collision with the wall. The Bebop also comes with a full spare set of propellers that are very easy to swap for broken ones, should the worst happen.
Specifications
- Size: 330 x 380 x 36mm with the shells attached
- Weight: 410g with the shells attached
- Flight time: 11 minutes
- Camera: 14-megapixel 180-degree fisheye lens, 3-axis digital stabilisation
- Video: 1080p at 30 frames per second
- Storage: 8GB
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi (2.4 and 5GHz) 250m range, microUSB, GPS/Glonass
There are three ways of directly controlling the Bebop using the app: tilt, virtual joysticks or tilt with independent camera control. The tilt control is fun as a toy, but difficult to use for any tight control. The virtual joysticks work well enough to fly it through an office without too much trouble – precision control is difficult on a touchscreen, however. Users can also plot a route on a map for the drone to fly itself using the built-in GPS chip outdoors. The drone has a 14-megapixel camera in the nose with a fish eye lens and a 180-degree field of view.
It records 1080p video at 30 frames per second, uses digital stabilisation and can adjust the angle of the camera independently from the motion of the drone. The image captured is flat, despite the fish eye lens that normally distorts the picture. The video is ultra-smooth, resembling the kind of motion seen in first-person video games. Even when banking hard with the drone the video is completely flat. The quality of the video is decent, akin to a mid-range action cam, but suffers from graining in poor lighting conditions such as those inside an office.
What you do with a drone in your own home is pretty much your business, but the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has certain rules about what you can and cannot do with remotely controlled flying objects including drones. The current legislation means that it is illegal to fly a drone within 50m of a building or a person and 150m of a built-up area. In addition, the maximum flight height is 400m and the drone has to remain in line of sight and within 500m of the pilot. For commercial purposes, pilots must complete a training course and apply for a permit to fly the drone from the CAA.
Price
The Parrot Bebop drone is available in red, blue and yellow and costs $599 or $950 with the controller. Two batteries are included, with extra batteries $75 a pop. Spare parts for all of the components of the Bebop are available individually from Parrot. The Parrot Bebop is a fantastic toy that allows users to go beyond just flying it around and crashing into things and make interesting videos and take photos from a completely new perspective.The flight time of about 10 minutes is long enough to do something meaningful and the 8GB storage is enough to record most of a flight. Despite being super smooth, the video is not of professional quality, but is perfectly good enough for most consumers. The biggest issue are the restrictions on where you can fly a drone. It is still fun to fly around indoors, but the lack of precision control with a touchscreen leads to more crashes than you would like for a $550 machine.
