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The camera market has long been segmented into three basic categories of users: Professionals, the so-called "serious hobbiest" and the newcomer. Whether or not these hard and fast divisions actually exist, cameras aimed at each market certainly do. Being about 150 years younger, the aerial photography market is somewhat less segmented. Up til now there have been only two categories: Professional drones and hobbiest drones.
With the new Breeze 4K, Yuneec is hoping to lure in the previously ignored newcomer market. Yes, it's the drone equivalent of a cellphone camera, complete with an over-emphasis on selfies.
As someone who falls somewhere between the professional and serious amateur markets (which is to say I make money off drone cameras, but have not, thus far, felt the need for a "pro" level drone like the DJI Inspire 2) the Breeze should be something I scoff at, but to tell you the truth it's a lot of fun. Would I bring it to a high end real estate photo shoot? No, but it's good at what it does, loads of fun to fly and produces the kind of results that will look good shared on small screens via Instagram and YouTube.
The Breeze is lightweight and designed to fit in a backpack. While it's light, at 13 ounces it still needs to be registered with the FAA. It comes in a plastic suitcase-style case that keeps it protected from accidents while in your bag, but overall the plastic feels stiff and it felt a little more fragile than the GDU Byrd, which I happened to be testing at the same time. The good news is that pretty much every part you're liable to break is for sale individually, making it easy, if perhaps costly, to get your drone back in the air should you crash or otherwise break it.
As the name implies the Breeze comes with a 4K capable camera (30fps) though there are several important caveats to bear in mind. First, there is no stabilizing gimbal so the steadiness of your video is directly tied to your skills as a pilot. Recognizing that the newcomer won't have those piloting skills yet, the Breeze includes a host of preprogrammed auto flying modes that go a long way to improving video results. In other words the auto modes handle the stability issues. There's also some built in digital stabilization, but, and here's the second caveat: digital stabilization only works with 1080p video, not the 4K footage. Sadly, that means that, while the Breeze clearly wants to tout its 4K capabilities, they're of limited usefulness without stabilization.
That doesn't mean, however, that the Breeze isn't capable of some great shots and video. Once I got my hands on a device new enough to run the companion app I had no trouble getting great looking 1080p footage of the kind that it took me months to learn how to get back when the first DJI Phantom was released. It was an eye opening view of how quickly the drone market has progressed.
But back to the controller, or rather lack of controller. Yes, the Breeze controller is a smartphone app. The controller consists of virtual joysticks that behave just like the real thing, minus all the tactile feedback that can help with your reaction times. But again, the manual controls are almost an afterthought here, the point is the plethora of automated flight modes. There's the usual suspects that every current drone has -- follow me and orbit -- and there's also a couple of others like the selfie mode, journey mode and the manual pilot mode.
Follow me and orbit work like they do in Yuneec's larger, more expensive drones. Selfie mode ditches the control interface entirely and simple offers a slider for controlling the camera. Journey mode was the most impressive, it starts with a fly away shot and then comes zooming back in producing some very nice, smooth video in the process.
The image and video quality is surprisingly good for a $500 drone this small. Video can be a little soft at times and stills probably won't look good as 16x20 prints, but for online sharing it's more than good enough most of the time. The one place I found it just didn't work well was in follow me mode where too tight of a shot made for jerky camera movements as the drone tried to keep up.
Backing it up a bit in altitude fixed the problem, but highlighted the other big shortcoming: the Breeze really only stays aloft for about 10 minutes. On the plus side Yuneec includes two batteries, which means you get 20 minutes of flight time out of the box (with one battery switch) which should be enough time to get all the selfies you need.
At $500 the Breeze feels maybe slightly overpriced for that it is. Fortunately since its release there seems to have been something of a price war going on between various retailers. I had no trouble finding it for $380 and even less at some stores. At that price I have no qualms saying the Breeze makes a great buy for anyone looking to get into drone photography without breaking the bank or their expensive new drone.
Wired: Automated flight modes make it possible to get good quality video and photos without the learning curve of more expensive drones. In app sharing lets you get the results out to the world with little effort. Surprisingly fun to fly when you do decide to try manual mode
Tired: Flight time is only about 10 minutes, no stabilization for 4K video makes it next to useless, follow me mode produced jerky flight (and therefore video) when it was lower in altitude.
Rating: 6? 7?
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