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.


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 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"

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.

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 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.