Advice Quadcopter

[Access Denied]

So I'm looking at buying one and I'm after advice on a decent model for £100-£150.

Any ideas?

 

[caLLous]

What do you want to do with it? I mean, you can get teeny little quadcopters for not very much money at all (like £30) but they're not much good for anything except learning how it all works.

 

[old.Tohtori]

Yeah start cheap, unless you need something big for Amazon delivery work or something. Camera stuff(usual more then just flying hobby) can probably be done with smaller ones even better.

 

[Access Denied]

What do you want to do with it? I mean, you can get teeny little quadcopters for not very much money at all (like £30) but they're not much good for anything except learning how it all works.

I want to have fun with it. I want to take it down the park and mess around with my mates and I want to fix a decent resolution camera to it and get some aerial shots of the countryside around here.

 

[caLLous]

I don't know that you can get one for 150 notes that will allow you to put on a "decent resolution camera". Some of the ickle ones have little cameras built into them but they are nothing to write home about (5 megapixel I think I saw and most likely a crappy little sensor, look up the Hubsan X4). You'll struggle to get something that can carry a GoPro (for example), which is the lightest "decent camera", for a lot less than £300 (plus the transmitter, plus the cost of the GoPro - although the GoPro Hero4 is out now so you're bound to find cheap Hero3s around).
Then add the cost of FPV (First Person View - seeing what the camera sees on a screen attached to the transmitter so you can line up shots rather than just eyeballing it from the ground and guessing) and it starts getting pricier and pricier.

 

[Job]

for results of any value you will need a 400 quid copter and 300 quids worth of camera and stabilisation gimbal.
without that the videos will be jerky..shaky and basically all over the place.

 

[caLLous]

You don't need a stabilised gimbal for photographs though, just a dampened mount to get rid of any vibrations that might get passed down to the camera from the drone. Having said that, I have the stabilised gimbal on my Phantom 2 and I can control the tilt of the camera from the transmitter, which is aces.

Without an FPV setup, you could set the cam to do a timelapse photo every second or something and send it up and just move it around until you think you've captured the angle you were after.

 

[Job]

Or buy a homing pigeon and a roll of sellotape.