Best Drones For Indoor

[jackandjay]

Air Hogs Helix X4 Stunt

The $65 Air Hogs Helix X4 won’t wow your friends. It’s not a speed demon you can send zipping around your lawn. But it is the only drone I flew directly into my precious Panasonic plasma TV, at top speed, without a care in the world. Completely covered in lightweight styrofoam armor, it didn’t leave so much as a scratch. It bounces off my walls, sticks to my ceilings, and doesn’t hurt even when I shove a finger right into its ducted fans. Plus, it’s easy to control: while it doesn’t have the fancy trim adjustments of practically every other drone I tried, it automatically compensated for minor deviations. I even flew it outdoors in a pinch. It’s also the only drone I could charge from its controller, which admittedly requires an outrageous 8 AA batteries.

Advanced Beginners: Blade Nano QX

The $90 Blade Nano QX makes the Helix X4 look like a giant blimp. With hobby-grade motors set in an incredibly lightweight frame, it’s blazing fast. When you set the controller to beginner mode, it’s stable enough to use indoors and there’s a expert mode that disables the gyroscope entirely for outdoor stunts. (It sounds like an angry bumblebee, which is comparatively a plus!)

Still, this quadcopter has so much power under the hood that its prop guards and bendy frame can’t protect it from the worst, as I discovered when cracking its cockpit, permanently deforming a propeller, and accidentally ripping out one of the motors (while trying to remove that propeller) over the course of an afternoon. While it comes with two sets of propellers and spare parts are modular and cheap, you’ll want to be a seasoned quadcopter pilot before taking off the safeties.

Best Miniature Drone: UDI U839

Thinking about buying an Estes Proto-X or Synchro? Buy this $30 drone instead. This cute ladybug of a palmtop quad has such a well-designed prop guard, it’s the only miniature drone that never once lost or bent a propeller when I repeatedly flew it into foreign objects. It’s also got way more power than other mini drones, which can admittedly make it a challenge to fly indoors — ease off on the throttle, folks — but also means it can actually challenge a light breeze if you take it outside.

Best Camera Drone: Syma X5C

There aren’t a lot of drones that have cameras and propeller guards, but this is the one to get right now. It’s a $60 DJI Phantom ripoff with cheap materials and a crappy camera, but nothing else comes close for the price Syma is asking. It’s one of the most stable cheap quadcopters I tried, stable enough to fly around my tiny townhouse indoors, and stable enough to fly in a mild breeze—though you’ll get some very shaky footage. You can start capturing video just by holding down a button on the remote control. The video quality is absolutely terrible, worse than any cameraphone you’ve used in the past decade, but even disgustingly bad footage from high in the sky has charm!

Quietest Drone: Syma X4

You’re not going to find a quadcopter that doesn’t sound like four propellers straining to keep themselves in the air, but the $35 Syma X4 more closely resembles a miniature blender than a dying vacuum cleaner. What’s more, it’s sleek, well-built, and wonderfully stable for indoor flights — easier to fly than any of the miniature drones I tried. Gamers (like me!) will find themselves right at home with its Xbox-style controller. Just make sure you check that all the buttons on the controller are working correctly: one of the important trim buttons on my controller was misaligned and extremely hard to press.

[bakara]

$^^E

[libraguy863]

Nice