DJI Phantom 4 Advanced Drone Launched With Upgraded Camera, Lower Price Point

After unveiling Phantom 4 Pro last year, drone industry's biggest name - DJI has now launched its DJI Phantom 4 Advanced drone. DJI says that its new drone provides users with an affordable way to capture aerial imagery with a powerful camera and precise controls. Notably, the company says that it comes with a new camera sensor compared the original Phantom 4 and will be available with a plus variant as well.

DJI Phantom 4 Advanced drone's "upgraded" camera is capable of recording 4K videos at 60 frames per second, the company said in a release. The video processing has also been improved and now supports H.264 4K videos at 60fps or H.265 4K at 30fps, both with a 100Mbps bitrate. "Excellent optical performance, sensors and processors ensure everything is captured with high dynamic range and more image detail needed for advanced post-production," the company said.

Just like Phantom 4 Pro, the new drone comes with key features that allow smooth automatic flight modes, including Draw, ActiveTrack, TapFly, Gesture, and Tripod, the company said.

"Equipped with the FlightAutonomy system made up of 5 vision sensors, forward-facing obstacle avoidance system, dual-band satellite positioning (GPS and GLONASS), and ultrasonic rangefinders, the Phantom 4 Advanced is able to hover precisely in places without GPS and fly in complex environments." DJI said.

Moving to the plus variant of the device, the Phantom 4 Advanced+ sports a 5.5-inch 1080p display integrated into the controller. The company says that the display is twice as bright as conventional smart devices and allows for convenient viewing when outdoors.

The Phantom 4 Advanced and Phantom 4 Advanced+ drones have been priced at $1,349 (roughly Rs. 87,000) and $1,649 (roughly Rs. 1.06 lakhs) respectively. The drones will be available on company's online store and will start shipping on April 30, 2017. Importantly, DJI has announced that with the release of the new drone, the original Phantom 4 drone will reach its End of Life (EOL) but customers will continue to receive after sales service from the company.

Separately, the company has also updated the DJI GO 4 companion app, which is used to control its drones. The new update brings Find My Drone feature to the app, which makes use of GPS to help users find out the recent location of the drone. Apart from this, with the latest update, the company has added audio recording function when caching video, a function to verify your purchase when activating your aircraft, and warnings for RTH altitude in the One-Tap RTH, as per the update log on Google Play.