Autel Evo 2 Launched at CES 2020, Drone Pilot Fined $20,000 for Careless Flight, DJI Black Friday Deals, SQUIDS Drone, Drone Industry to Hit $100 Billion in 2020

[00:01] Paul: You’re listening to the Ask Drone U podcast. You ask, we answer your drone questions. Whether you’re here to turn you passion into profit or you simply fly for fun, we’re a community of learners and teachers who aspire to achieve greatness. We are Drone U.

[00:18] Paul: Hey, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the holiday season. That’s right, it’s the holiday season and we’ve got a lot of news for you in this week’s episode of drone news.

[music]

[00:34] Paul: Joining me as always is The Flying Dutchman. Haye, how are you?

[00:39] The Flying Dutchman: Hey, Paul, I’m doing great. How are you? And Happy Thanksgiving to you as well by the way, and everybody who’s listening.

[00:44] Paul: Yes, I’m not sure if you know this but in America, Thanksgiving represents when we overcame the enormous amount of native turkeys that were fighting our army back in the 1800s so that’s why we have Thanksgiving now, I don’t know if you knew that.

[01:02] HAYE: A huge challenge, I’m sure. I had no idea, I always wondered where the turkey came from, but now I know.

[chuckle]

[01:10] Paul: For everyone out there, they know that’s not the truth. But we are actually excited to give you some more truth because we’ve got a lot of drone news. And Haye, I have to say this, I’m just gonna come out and I’m gonna say it ’cause I wanna say it, but it looks like a lot of the things that you and I have been forecasting, the things that we have been projecting that we thought would come to fruition, these things are finally coming to fruition. So, it’s really exciting to see all this new competition to DJI, and I’m not even getting started in this first piece of drone news.

[music]

[01:45] Paul: But Haye, seriously, DJI’s competition. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. The door has been wide open, Skydio came out and they completely changed the way that we fly. I know that there are some naysayers… Ryan, I’m looking at you, and I know that there are some people out there who think that it is just not possible to compete with DJI. But when DJI handcuffed themselves earlier this year, it seemed like this was an amazing opportunity for other manufacturers to come out and provide competition to the industry as a whole. Now, I know DJI watches this, I know Autel watches this show, I know Skydio watches this show, I know the Feds watch the show, I know the FAA watches the show. And I have to say, competition is a good thing for everyone. But Haye, what do you have?

[02:32] HAYE: For sure, Paul, competition is good for everybody involved. And yeah, like you said, this was an opportunity ready to be taken, and we knew that one of the strong companies had to step up and was gonna do something. We thought maybe Parrot was gonna do something at some point, and then of course more obviously, it became Skydio with the Skydio 2, and now, the Autel EVO 2. That’s information just got leaked yesterday through an SEC filing, and that drone is really, really something it seems. If you just look at the specs, it’s gonna have 8K video capability, it’s gonna have… Well, let me back up. It’s gonna have three different gimbal modules that you can change yourself as a drone pilot. One of them is gonna have 8K video capabilities, the other one is gonna be a 1-inch sensor with 6K video capabilities, and then also, there’s gonna be a dual sensor option.

[03:22] HAYE: So, real quick here, if you think about it, they’re gonna compete head on basically with the DJI Mavic 2 Zoom. Because with this one, you’ll be able to zoom in digitally and hardly lose any quality really. They’re gonna compete with the DJI Mavic Pro when it comes to all the low-light capability and just the resolution in photos and in video quality. They’re gonna compete with the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise and the Enterprise Dual as well with this Autel EVO 2 dual sensor setup. So yeah, I’m super excited about this. The drone is gonna have a fly time… I’m just going through the specs real quick, a fly time of 35 minutes, which is really really long, it’s gonna have a special night beads mode for nighttime photography and videography, 44-mile per hour top speed, 60-mile range, 360-degree obstacle avoidance, no geofencing as of yet in the United States, and a take-off weight of 2 lbs and 3 oz. So, for a lot of people who weren’t happy with the DJI Mavic 2 Pro when it came out, it seems like Autel is ticking all the boxes and we’re super excited for this drone to hit the market.

[04:30] Paul: It sounds like Autel is giving everyone or the community what we almost were asking for with the DJI Phantom 5, right? We wanted these interchangeable payloads, we wanted these large format sensors for mapping and photography and videography, but we also want something portable. So, I also love how you can do everything with just one drone. I don’t have to go out and buy three drones to do three different jobs. And you know what? That builds trust, Haye, and I have to say, Autel, very well done, extremely excited. And Haye, as you know, I leaked the dual camera, and I hope you liked my photo because it was completely Photoshopped from yours truly.

[05:14] HAYE: If you see the photos here, how your drone photo actually resembles the actual product, you’re not that far off.

[05:21] Paul: Yes, I did. [chuckle] It might be because I may or may not have seen the said product. [chuckle]

[05:26] HAYE: You kinda knew what to adjust there. [chuckle]

[05:29] Paul: Yes, yes, but it was a lot of fun and it was… I’m really happy that this is out. This is something that I think the community is just gonna absolutely love. Now, you talked about 6K video, you talked about 8K video, as far as megapixels are concerned, what are the different sensor sizes and what type of megapixel or what type of resolution are you seeing from these sensors?

[05:53] HAYE: Let me run through that real quick as well. So there’s three different gimbal setups with camera attached to them that you can interchange yourself. The first one is the 586 gimbal that provides an 8K video camera, that takes still photos up to 48 megapixels and records 8K video up to 25 frames per second, 6K at 30 frames per second, or 4K at 30 or 60 frames per second with a bit rate of 120 megabytes per second. So, these specs blow any DJI Mavic 2 drone straight out of the water basically.

[06:27] Paul: Phantom, Inspire, X5, X7, X4.

[06:30] HAYE: Yeah.

[06:32] Paul: They just took out the Inspire with this drone.

[06:35] HAYE: Yup. The only thing we don’t know is exactly what the sensor size is itself. If you go through the manual from the Autel EVO 2, it only specifies or specifically mentions the sensor size for the second option, which is the 383 gimbal that features an ultra HD camera with a 1-inch sensor for 6K video, still photos up to 20 megapixels, and that one records 5.5K video at 60 frames per second or… And wait for this one, 4K video at 120 frames per second. So you can do super high class slow motion, it’s amazing. And an adjustable aperture that goes from 2.8 to F11. So, that’s… It’s pretty amazing.

[07:20] HAYE: Then the last one, the dual sensor gimbals, the one with which they specifically go after the first responders, fire departments, police departments markets, this one combines an infrared camera that has 640 x 512, and records video at 720P, but combines that with the 8K video. So you can do both basically, a zoom in… Yeah, this sounds like a great search and rescue drone, specifically when you keep in mind that you also got a range of 60 miles. So, if you need to find missing people in a large foresty area, and assuming that you’re allowed to fly in those conditions and fly beyond line of sight, you’d be able to use this drone and cover a lot of grounds and find missing people. The best part is that we won’t even have to wait very long for this drone to hit the markets as we’ve heard that it’s gonna be launched in January of 2020. So, it’s gonna be available soon. And yeah, I have it on my Christmas list for sure. I’m not sure I’m gonna work this out, but I wanna get my hands on this one for sure.

[08:19] Paul: Take my money, take it.

[chuckle]

[08:22] Paul: I want one. Holy cow, this is what every drone pilot has been asking for, especially public safety. And I have to say, I am so, so glad that someone is offering this. And Autel, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. And thank you from everyone in the community. But especially, thank you because search and rescue is gonna be absolutely unreal with this drone.

[08:48] HAYE: Yeah.

[08:49] Paul: So really, really, really, really excited. Wow! I guess it’s gonna suck for all those stores that only represent DJI, huh?

[08:58] HAYE: I don’t know. But if I had a drone store, I think I would want this in my inventory for sure. The one thing we don’t yet know is the different pricing points at which Autel is gonna launch the EVO 2. I hope they’re gonna stay somewhat close to where the Mavic 2 Pro was positioned. Although, I can imagine that the dual sensor gimbal is gonna be, of course, quite some more expensive. If I’m not mistaken, the Enterprise Dual, I think retails for $26.99. With these higher specs, I would imagine that the Autel drones might be slightly more expensive. But still, you got a super powerful drone that’s foldable, lightweight, easy to take with you and it has pretty much all the capabilities any drone pilot could ask for. So yeah, super exciting news.

[09:41] Paul: Unbelievably exciting. Hopefully, it has attitude mode or some way to disable GPS, as I still think that that’s incredibly important for…

[09:49] HAYE: It has, it has.

[09:50] Paul: Yeah. Well, I know they said that the EVO had the attitude mode, but I’m not sure I could ever figure out how to get it on my bird. ‘Cause I remember taking my EVO down to the Bahamas and it was an awesome drone, really loved it. So, what I really love though, Haye, is the built-in screen. Love the built-in screen on the remote, that’s just so valuable in the field.

[10:14] HAYE: Yup.

[10:14] Paul: So anyway…

[10:15] HAYE: And the new remote, it’s gonna be an OLED screen. I’ve got some picture of that as well, so I’ll write another article showing exactly how the remote controller works. But it seems to be a really nice one. Now, you won’t need to put your phone in so you don’t get those phone calls in between and all the other stuff. Yeah, it’s nice.