DJI wants everyone to be able to fly a drone. At least, that's the message it seems to be sending with the Spark ($499), the company's smallest aircraft yet. It's a selfie drone you can interact with just by waving your hand. It's also a short-range quadcopter that can be controlled with your smartphone, complete with forward obstacle avoidance and subject tracking capabilities. Add an accessory remote and you've got a very capable bird, with a 31mph top speed and a robust operating range.
Can it be all things to all people? Not really. It works well for selfies and quick shots, but battery life is short, the video editing process isn't as easy as promised, and flying with your smartphone is kludgy. If you want a drone, but don't want to have to worry about learning to fly one like a pro, the Spark is worth a look. But if you want a more versatile quadcopter in a small form factor, and are interested in learning to fly it manually, the DJI Mavic Pro is a stronger, albeit more expensive, choice.
Design
The Spark ($499.00 at Amazon) is tiny. It measures 2.2 by 5.6 by 5.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 10.6 ounces—DJI points out it weighs less than a can of soda. It's not foldable, though the propellers do fold in for easy transport—you don't have to remove them for storage, so the Spark is always ready to fly. And there are colors. You can get it in Alpine White, Lava Red, Meadow Green, Sky Blue, and Sunrise Yellow. As you can see, our review model is Sunrise Yellow.
It uses microSD memory to store images and video. A removable battery promises 16 minutes of flight time per charge, though in our field tests, the best we managed was 12 minutes. It's still better than the six minutes you get with tiny selfie drones like the Dobby. There's a micro USB port, so you can plug the Spark into a portable battery pack or your laptop to recharge its battery. Extra batteries are priced at a reasonable $49.
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The camera sports a 1/2.3-inch CMOS image sensor, the same type you find in a typical pocket superzoom and slightly larger than the sensor in an iPhone. The lens is a fixed 25mm f/2.6 equivalent, capable of capturing 12MP still images and 1080p video at 30fps and 24Mbps. You don't get the option to shoot at 24fps for a more cinematic look, and there's no 60fps or 120fps capability to record smoother footage for slow-motion playback. This isn't as serious a video tool as other DJI drones, like the Mavic Pro ($999.00 at DJI) , which supports 4K capture and additional frame rate options. A two-axis mechanical gimbal keeps footage stable during flight.
The normal array of safety features are baked into the design. You get GPS/GLONASS satellite positioning to keep it steady when flying outdoors and to bring it home automatically if communication is interrupted, or on demand. Forward-facing sensors detect obstacles at distances of up to 16 feet, and the Spark is smart enough to change its flight path and fly around them. And you've got the Vision Positioning System (VPS), a downward-facing sensor array that keeps the aircraft hovering in place when flying indoors without the aid of GPS.
The Spark is really stable. It hovers in place with ease, even indoors without the aid of GPS stabilization. I flew it on a breezy late May day and it stayed in place under mild gusts of wind, albeit at a fairly low altitude. We expect DJI drones to be rock solid in the air and the Spark doesn't disappoint in any way.
Registration
The Spark arrives with news from DJI that it will severely limit the functionality of its current product line if you fail to register via a DJI Go account. This comes on the heels of a court ruling that states that the FAA doesn't have the authority to charge you $5 to register a drone.
The Spark is heavier than 8 ounces, so it would have fallen under the FAA's registration requirements if they were still in place. When you see and hold the Spark in your hand, it's easy to realize that the 8-ounce figure the FAA cooked up is a bit silly—the average adult pigeon weighs about 13 ounces and the FAA hasn't tried to regulate them, at least not yet.
With the FAA temporarily out of the registration business, DJI has stepped in. I'm all for responsible drone ownership, and I'm pretty confident that DJI's implementation will be a nominal concern for most neophyte pilots. It's not impossible to get in trouble flying the Spark—don't fly it on a crowded city street or in a packed sports arena—but the small size and weight, along with the limited range when using the smartphone as a control, means less cause for concern.
If you are vehemently opposed to registration, don't buy a Spark, or any DJI drone for that matter. There are alternatives—the Yuneec Breeze is similar in design to the Spark and, at press time, Yuneec won't make you set up an account to obtain full functionality.
Flight Experience
You may be wary of putting a device with fast-spinning rotors in your hand. I've been cut by a drone propeller before and it's not a pleasant experience. But as long as your fingers don't extend into the colored top portion of the Spark, you're safe. A DJI rep stated you may cut yourself if a finger catches the edge of one of the blades, but due to their folding nature, you won't do much damage if your finger slips closer to the center of the prop. I haven't tested this personally, but be careful. If you plan on doing a lot of hand takeoffs and landings, invest in a set of propeller guards—they add $19 to the cost.
The Spark is small enough to fly indoors, and its VPS keeps it hovering in place even without the aid of GPS. I wouldn't recommend flying it in small confines, but if you've got a large sitting room or space, you can certainly break it out for some interior aerials. Realtors should pay attention to this one.
Gesture controls are the whiz-bang, attention-grabbing features that are new to the Spark, so let's talk about them first. You hold the Spark in the palm of your hand, camera facing you, at arm's length, and tap its power button twice in quick succession. The camera pans up and down, until it locks on your face. Its front lights blink green, and its motors spin up. You need to let it go to take flight. I had a hard time letting it go on my frist attempt, but once I let go it shot into the air. On my second try, I let go too soon and it fell to the ground. By the third attempt I had it figured out—you'll get a feel for when the Spark is ready to leave your hand.
Take a step back and place your palm toward the camera. The front lights will go green when it recognizes you. Move your hand left and the drone flies to your left. It's really cool—this is tech that's meant to turn heads. The initial shot is quite tight, however, so you'll want to get the drone further away from you for better footage.
Waving back and forth makes the drone pull back and up, about 15 feet in each direction, it will keep that distance and continue to track your movements. It's a fun way to shoot a selfie that reveals your surroundings. If you want to snap a shot just put your hands together, mimicking a picture frame. Throw your hands up straight into the air when you want the Spark to land. It will fly toward you and hover in place. Place your hand out underneath it, palm up, and the drone gently lands. It's pretty neat.
What if something goes wrong? If you can't get control of it and are flying by gesture alone, you can just wait until it runs out of battery and lands automatically. Or you can grab it from the air and twist it so the rotors are perpendicular to the ground—they'll turn off immediately.
Before you even use gestures to fly, you have to perform an initial setup in the app. And as of now there's no way to trigger the Spark to start recording video footage using gestures, so you'll need the app for that as well.
If you're just interested in having the Spark track your movemetns on the ground, the gesture controls get the job done. But if you want to take advantage of some of the baked-in video shots, or if you want to fly manually using on-screen controls, the DJI Go 4 app (available for Android and iOS) is a necessity.
There are four basic types of automated shots—Circle, Dronie, Helix, and Rocket. Circle and Helix are similar, with the former simply orbiting around an identified subject in space and the camera staying locked onto target the entire time. Helix is similar, but the radius and altitude increase as it progresses. Using Circle is pretty easy; I was able to gauge how much clear space was around me and perform consistently safe orbits.
I had a harder time with Helix. The shot took the drone out farther away than I expected, quickly. It's very easy to abort the shot using the app, but you need to pay attention to the movement of the drone, and keep your phone at the ready, to do so. My recommendation is to avoid using Helix if there are trees anywhere nearby. The Spark has obstacle avoidance, but only in the front, so it's still possible to run into something when flying sideways.
Dronie is similar to shots you get with gesture controls, starting close and pulling up and back to reveal your surroundings, but it goes further back and away. Rocket is also a reveal—it starts over your head, with the camera pointing straight down, and pulls straight up to show your surroundings.
There are a couple of special still photography modes. It's easy to snap a 12MP image using the shutter button in the DJI Go app. You can change the shooting mode to access Shallow Depth of Field and Panorama shots. The former locks onto a subject and flies about two feet straight up. It combines several images into a 1.6MP JPG, which is supposed to blur the background like a wide aperture SLR lens. My attempts to use it ended up being very subtle, barely noticeable really, and not at all like what you get with a full-frame camera or even the portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus. The image below on the left is a standard photo, and on the right is the same shot with the Shallow effect enabled.
Panorama mode is a bit more useful to photographers—the drone flies sideways or vertically and stitches together a wide panoramic shot. These special shots are only saved to the Spark's memory card; they don't automatically show up in the DJI Go app like other images, which is a curious oversight.
Flying manually with the app is accomplished via on-screen control sticks. They act just like the physical controls on a dedicated remote, with the left stick adjusting altitude and yaw, and the right moving the drone through space. The experience is rather clumsy compared with using a real remote. There's no physical feedback to your actions, and you'll find yourself looking at the screen more than the drone in flight, with your fingers obscuring the camera view.
Top speed is also pretty paltry with the smarpthone. I saw a maximum 12mph in my flight logs, with average movement at about 7mph. You're limited to close range flight, with a geofence of about 327 feet (100 meters) around you and a maximum 164-foot (50-meter) ceiling.
I haven't flown the Spark with the dedicated remote control—DJI didn't have one available to test at press time. It improves operating range to a theoretical 1.2 miles (although the short battery life means that you'll want to keep the Spark a lot closer to home than that), ups the standard cruising speed, and adds a Sport mode that moves the Spark through the air at 31mph—but disables obstacle avoidance, so be careful.
The remote is set to sell for $149 on its own, and it comes with the Fly More Combo, a $699 bundle that also includes propeller guards, extra propellers, a spare battery, a charger that replenishes three batteries simultaneously, and a carrying case. But if you're thinking about spending $699 on the Spark, you should really, really think about stretching your budget to get the $999 Mavic Pro.
Ease of Use
The Spark is supposed to be easy to use. And it is...sort of. Don't get me wrong, getting the drone up in the air using gesture controls is simple, and the fact that it will automatically identify you and track your movements after it takes off from your hand is a big plus.
The DJI Go 4 app supports all of the company's current line, from the popular Phantom series right up through the industrial Matrice family, using a singular interface. And it's not one that screams "easy." If you want to grab a quick Rocket shot from the top of a mountain you've got to tap an icon, change the shooting mode, drag a box around yourself, and then hit Go to get the shot started. There should be an easier way to do this—and a quicker way, because 12 minutes in the air goes by really fast. In contrast, the similar Yuneec Breeze has an app with large, easy to understand icons for each of the automated flight modes on its home screen.
I don't think DJI should dumb down the DJI Go 4. Veteran pilots are used to its design, and the app does a lot. But I'd love to see a more simple, streamlined interface as an option for Spark owners who want to get the drone up in the air for a quick shot and then back down, without having to drill down through a couple of menu screens to get there.
The app does a better job mitigating the chore of video editing, but it's not perfect. For the most control you'll still want to copy files from the memory card to your computer and work to edit footage yourself. Desktop editing is the way to go if you care about quality—the DJI Go app outputs video at a paltry 5.3Mbps, while the Spark records 1080p30 video at a much crisper 24Mbps bit rate.
You have to be careful to remember to copy video from the Spark's microSD card before you start editing. When you look at the app at first, you'll see all of your clips. These are low-quality videos buffered from the live stream from the Spark to app. Don't use them, as they're blurry and pixelated. To download the full-resolution version, go into a clip and click the Download Original button when the Spark is connected via Wi-Fi.
Sometimes this will work fine. Sometimes you'll get an error message telling you that the clip isn't on the card, even if it is. There's another download option, in the top left corner of the editor, that lets you browse the Spark's memory and download video on a clip-by-clip basis. That worked a lot better for me. But it was a little slow, copying video at a meager 4.3Mbps, and it puts a strain on the Spark's battery—I had a 15 percent drop in life after transferring about 10 minutes of video. Battery life is a big concern, and this doesn't help. If you have a phone with a microSD slot, you can sidestep this process by simply putting the card into your phone.
The long and short of it: There's room for DJI to improve its Go app. Yes, you can wave your hand and move the Spark through the air. But setting up shots and editing video isn't as magical an experience.
Conclusions
The DJI Spark delivers one of the best technological parlor tricks I've ever seen. Launching out of your hand and controlling a drone with a wave of your hand is a lot of fun. But when you dive deeper, some issues become apparent. The Spark is meant to be the drone for everyone, but I think that most users will be frustrated with the battery life, making at least one spare an essential acccessory. When you couple it with the rather disappointing experience of manual flight via smartphone, it makes the $699 bundle, which includes an extra battery as well as a remote control, a more appealing—but significantly more expensive—purchase.
The DJI Go app is another potential pain point for first-time pilots. It's a great for experienced users, but I think it leaves a lot to be desired for new flyers who don't want to have to delve deep into its interface to get a shot. There should be a simplified interface for the Spark that makes its various automated shots more accessible. Likewise, the in-app video editing experience is underwhelming. It's simply not as transparent an experience as DJI promises.
Even with my complaints about the battery, at 12 minutes the Spark flies longer than competing small drones, and extra batteries aren't overly expensive. And, while it takes some tapping and drilling down to set up the automated video shots, the shots themselves look really good. The Spark itself is a solid option for if you want a drone for short aerial shots, but don't want to really delve into the ins and outs of flying one manually.
The Yuneec Breeze is the Spark's closest competitor, sells for $50 less, and records in 4K. We're still testing it, so we'll see if the actual video quality lives up to the 4K promise. Also available in this price range is the Parrot Bebop 2 FPV—its camera isn't as good as you get with the Spark, and it doesn't have nearly as many automated shot options, but it includes a remote control and can fly for about 20 minutes. And of course there's our favorite compact drone, the $999 DJI Mavic Pro. It's the one to get if you're more serious about a small quadcopter. It flies farther, and while there's no gesture control, you do get forward obstacle advoidance, much longer flying time, and stabilized 4K footage, as well as a good number of automated flight modes.
The DJI Spark is a $500 palm-size gesture-controlled selfie drone for the masses, but it's hampered by short flying time and an app that could be easier to use.
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