first draft of P4 review

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-22 miles per hour. In normal flight mode it can reach 35 miles an hour, and in the new sport mode it can fly at an astonishing 45 miles per hour. For experienced pilots, sport mode is a real treat, adding a lot of horsepower and agility to the craft. For professional camera operators sport mode will enable a lot more dynamic chase shots while filming high speed stunts or races.
+tk intro goes here
 
+The DJI Phantom 4 continues to refine the features of its predecessor, with a particular emphasis on automated flight and collision avoidance. It's not yet a fully autonomous drone to do you bidding with nothing more than the flick of a finger, but it might stop you from flying head-on into a tree. Even better, the new TapFly feature might help you get through tight spots you're not comfortable flying though by yourself.
 
-DJI claims the Phantom 4 is five times more stable than its predecessor, and in our testing it delivered incredibly smooth footage. While hovering it never had an issue holding its exact position to within an inch or two, even in moderate winds. The extra stability come courtesy of an additional IMU, and double the number of downward facing cameras and sonar sensors, which the Phantom uses for its visual positioning system. When executing an automatic return to its home position the craft always landed within a few inches of its takeoff position. 
+The Phantom 4 looks similar to the Phantom 3 though the props have changed. The entire motor now sits outside the arm, which makes the Phantom 4 look a bit sleeker. It also means that there's nowhere to attach prop guards, which I occasionally missed (especially flying indoors around people, but you should not do that anyway).
 
+The biggest news in the Phantom 4 is the new collision detection feature. The pitch is that the Phantom 4 will stop you from flying into trees and somehow miraculously make it possible for anyone to fly. The truth is more prosaic. The collision detection features only work when you're flying forward. They will never warn you about obstacles when you're flying in any other direction. Want to hit a tree? Just back up. Or go left. Or right. Or slightly off center.
 
-The coolest new feature by far is TapFly. You have a live feed from the drone’s main camera on the screen of your mobile device. Tap anywhere on that image and the drone will fly in that direction. The drone will automatically ease into turns, avoiding the jerky motion that I often got in my footage while flying manually.
-"Autonomy allows safe, easy, but limited flight"
+That's not to say the collision detection isn't useful. It is, but it isn't enough for you stop worrying about flying into things. It works best on large dark objects, I flew it right at a volunteer subject and it stopped about four feet in front of him and refused to get closer. It was however happy to fly straight into his raised arms, which where not sufficiently big enough to detect. It was also happy to fly into bushes (again, the bushes were likely not dense enough to detect). The Phantom 4 will also not detect what might be a drone's greatest enemy -- power lines.
 
-The limitation here is that you are mostly moving in one direction — forward _ which is the only direction in which the obstacle avoidance works. The sensors have a 60 degree field of view, meaning you can only turn at a roughly 30 degree angle, all the while moving forward. If you want to execute a tight turn or head back the way you came from, you’ll need to get on the control sticks or use the automatic "return to home" function.
+Still this is the first release of the collision detection system and it's not hard to imagine future releases adding more cameras around the body of the Phantom to make collision detection possible on all sides.
 
-The obstacle avoidance is quite cautious. Sometimes when I asked it to navigate through a stand of trees with a few feet of clearance on either side, it refused. TapFly also declined to work when you were too low, for example right after an automatic takeoff. That meant I had to touch the sticks a little before switching over to rely totally on the screen of my mobile device.
+The collision detection is at its best when combined with what might be the best new feature in the Phantom 4 -- TapFly. TapFly allows you to use your touch screen device to simply tap anywhere on the screen and have the Phantom fly toward it. There's a horizon line you can use to control the altitude of your automated flight and the collision detection will avoid most solid objects.
 
-The other big autonomous feature is AutoTrack. You select a subject — a person, a bike, a car — and the drone will lock on and keep them in the center of the frame. It does this using the same computer vision technology employed for obstacle avoidance, except this time it’s building a 3D model not just of the environment, but also of the target you want to track.
+I used TapFly to fly gaps between trees that I would never have attempted on my own and that alone makes the Phantom 4 worth the upgrade. Again, it's also not hard to see how this might be improved with future releases -- for example, adding a way to slow down and speed up the drone at specific points in the flight path.
+
+The other new automated flight control system is an object tracker, which works well for tracking people in relatively open settings. The software sometimes gets confused if someone of similar appearance crosses paths with your subject, but barring big city crowds, this should work well. Well enough to be moderately creepy. Especially if the Phantom is at max range straight up, which I did not test because that would be against FAA regulations.
+
+Luckily for the paranoid, while the Phantom's camera has been improved, it still isn't going to pick out individuals for tracking from a half mile up. Don't worry, the police have military drone for that. The Phantom 4's camera improvements are subtle, but when looking at footage from a Phantom 3 next to the 4 you'll notice the latter has considerably less chromatic aberration, less noise and slightly less distortion. 
+
+The new sport mode is one of the highlights of the Phantom 4. The Phantom line was already the nimblest of the half dozen drones I've tested, but the sport mode puts it in a class all its own. With a top speed of 45 miles an hour and the ability to turn so fast the craft nearly flips over sport mode is not necessarily the best way to shoot incredible video (at top speed the props will by in your shot) but it sure is fun to fly. And shooting forward while flying backward looks good even at top speeds, which will enable professional film makers to better track high speed sequences like chase scenes or races.
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+Sport mode does come with a price though, battery life is significantly less than normal mode.The downside to sport mode is that you can't use any of the automated flight controls or collision detection features. Sport mode is very clearly aimed at experienced pilots and if you happen to be one it's a lot of fun.
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+DJI claims the Phantom 4 is five times more stable than previous models and while I have not empirical way to test this, it sounds about right. When watching footage where the Phantom 4 was just hovering I frequently found myself thinking I had accidentally paused playback because the video shot did not change or shake at all. Even in moderate wind the Phantom 4 managed to hold its position with hardly a waver.
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+Much of that stability comes from the Phantom 4 expanded array of downward cameras and sonar sensors. The Phantom 4 has double the number of downward facing cameras compared to the Phantom 3. This comes in handy indoors, which is one place the Phantom 4 is nothing short of incredible. Flying a drone indoors is a nerve wracking experience, even with the relatively stable Phantom 3. The Phantom 4 however maintained its same stability even inside when I tested it over an unused ice hockey rink. It was actually enjoyable to fly inside, though the lack of prop guards made me reluctant to get it too close to the walls.
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+The Phantom 4 is DJI's best Phantom offering yet and while the automated flight features might not entirely live up to the hype, they do make possible things that would have previously been very difficult or even impossible. They also pave the way for even more automation in future releases.
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+Wired: Insanely fast sport mode is a ton of fun, camera improvements make for better video and automated flight features make it possible to do things previous models cannot.
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+Tired: The batteries have changed shape again, which means if you're upgrading you'll need buy new batteries again too. Collision detection could be better.
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+Rating: 8/10