We Tried DJI's Newest Drone, the Spark: At Last, a Drone You Can Just Pull Out and Fly

Remember the Lily drone? The idea Lily never pulled off, DJI has now built.

Last week DJI held two launch events, one in the United States and one in China, to unveil its newest drone: the Spark, called Xiao in Chinese. All told, the Spark is basically a toy drone meant to replace the selfie stick.

We say that because flying the Spark feels nothing like flying a drone used to. Take it out, check that the battery has enough charge, switch it on, and hold it flat in your palm. Face the sensor on the front of the Spark, press the power button on the back twice in quick succession, and it lifts straight off your hand.

Hold your palm up in front of it and the Spark finds where your hand is; once it locks on, the two indicator lights on the front turn green. Move your hand and the drone keeps its eyes on it, flying circles with you at the center.

Wave at the Spark and it backs away while climbing, then hovers about 3 meters above you and 5 meters out. From there it locks onto you on its own, follows you, and starts recording.

To stop the tracking shot, raise both arms toward the Spark and the drone drops and comes back toward you, ending up hovering within about 1 meter. Then hold your palm out about 10 centimeters below it, and the Spark lands itself in your hand.

This whole way of flying, with no remote control at all, is appearing on a mass-produced drone for the first time — but it may not feel new to everyone. The concept video the American startup Lily released for its 2013 crowdfunding campaign showed almost exactly the same product idea, and Lily's plans went further still: the drone could supposedly be thrown straight into water and take off from the surface. Lily never produced a single working prototype, and the project was eventually declared a failure.

The Spark is a quadcopter. Set beside DJI's earlier Phantom and Mavic drones, the Spark's body is about the size of a soda can. It can't fold its arms the way the Mavic does, but no dimension exceeds 17 centimeters and it weighs only 300 grams. Just as the name Xiao sounds like xiǎo, the Chinese word for small, this is a drone small enough to carry in your pocket.

As a drone, the Spark has a removable battery rated for 15 minutes of flight; in our own tests it usually reached 12 or 13 minutes before showing a low-battery warning and landing itself. The Spark can fly with no phone and no remote at all, on gestures alone. It can also be flown from a phone over Wi-Fi, which gives a control range of about 100 meters. Buy the separate remote controller and that range stretches to 1,000 meters.

The front of the Spark has a window with a faint red tint, holding a vision-based obstacle-avoidance camera and an active infrared sensor. The camera lets it dodge obstacles straight ahead in flight; the infrared sensor reads hand gestures and body movements used to steer it. Underneath sit visible-light and ultrasonic sensors, which keep it from hitting the ground and hold the hover steady.

In short, the obstacle avoidance and flight technology in the Spark are all things DJI has already proven on earlier products, with some of it simplified to shrink the aircraft. You can think of the Spark as a scaled-down Mavic.

As a flying camera, the Spark may be the most distinctive product DJI has released so far.

The Spark, now on sale, comes in a standard kit with propellers, a battery, and a carrying case — but no remote controller, unlike every DJI drone before it. It is sold that way because the Spark can fly without a remote or a phone.

The front of the Spark carries a 1/2.3-inch camera sensor, about the size of a phone camera's, steadied by a two-axis mechanical gimbal. Compared with DJI's earlier products this gimbal is also a stripped-down version: it cannot stabilize rotation in the horizontal plane, only two axes, side-to-side tilt and vertical tilt. That is, the Mavic can counter the aircraft's up-and-down movement and its side-to-side sway, but cannot steady rotation left and right. The Spark's camera also can't change video quality — it shoots 1080p at 30 frames per second, and nothing else.

Once connected to the phone app, the Spark gains a feature of its own called QuickShot. Switch it on and you pick from a few fixed moves — backing away while rising, spiraling upward, climbing straight up — and the Spark shoots a clip of a few dozen seconds with you at the center. That use case is built for sharing on social networks; shooting is where the Spark's value lies.

In use, the Spark shows a well worked-out product logic. If you do extreme sports, you don't need a friend along — bring the Spark and it will film your practice runs and performances any time. If you climb, you can carry only your phone, and once you reach the height you want, use the phone to fly the Spark up from the ground below for a shot you couldn't otherwise get. If you want to treat the Spark as a conventional drone, add the remote controller and a phone and it will fly several hundred meters out and several dozen meters up, taking the kind of aerial photos any drone takes.

In real shooting, the Spark's photo quality passes, especially in panorama mode. Press the shutter in that mode and the aircraft turns itself in the air, takes 9 or more photos, and stitches them into one full-resolution image. Judging by the results, it comes close to the panorama mode on an ordinary phone such as the iPhone.

In depth-of-field mode, the Spark produces something like Portrait Mode on the iPhone 7/Plus, blurring the background behind a person. It gets there differently from phones like the iPhone: it takes 15 shots in a row at different focus points and merges them, and the app lets you adjust how strong the blur is afterward. On the whole, depth-of-field mode beats what phones like the iPhone manage, though it is clearly behind what a camera drone in DJI's Phantom line can do.

Perhaps because it is so small and light, the Spark flies noticeably less steadily in wind than DJI's other products. The spec sheets for both the Spark and the Mavic claim they can hold up in force-4 winds, but the Spark visibly rises and dips when the wind hits it.

Probably because of where the product sits and how its cost was kept down, the lower-resolution camera leaves the Spark's automatic tracking weaker than that of the pricier Mavic and Phantom. In a crowd, the Mavic can pick you out from among several people; even if you walk through knots of passersby while it films you, the Mavic follows fairly steadily, while the Spark loses you. The Mavic can lock onto a user from more than ten meters away and track steadily; the Spark can generally lock on only within 5 to 10 meters, and beyond that it is helpless.

In some situations the Spark also turns unsteady, or simply isn't enough. In harsh direct sunlight, for instance, the active infrared sensor is not very responsive, and steering the Spark by gesture under a strong sun means it often loses track of your moving palm. Try to use the Spark as a normal drone and its performance may disappoint you: say you are hiking in the back hills, spot an interesting rock formation in the distance and want to fly it over for a look using your phone — a hundred-odd meters out and it tells you you've passed the limit of the control range.

Taken together, it is less a drone than a camera. Plenty of people still buy Casio's selfie camera even though their phones can take selfies; the Spark is essentially a camera that flies, standing in for the impossibly long selfie stick that could never exist, and for the photographer running after you with a GoPro.

Besides shipping without a remote controller, one more feature shows where the Spark sits.

In some conditions the Spark is not bound by the no-fly zones built into DJI's other drones. To protect its users and itself, DJI puts GPS-based flight-area limits in every drone it makes: takeoff is banned anywhere inside Beijing's Sixth Ring Road, for example, and flying is banned around every airport in the country. But as a flying camera, in our tests — indoors or out — the Spark will fly anywhere in Beijing as long as you launch it from your palm with gesture control.

Use a phone or a remote, though, and the Spark becomes like any other drone: no flying inside a no-fly zone. If you take off by gesture and then connect a phone or remote, the DJI app flags a no-fly zone and the drone lands itself.

A DJI employee told QDaily that it is true the Spark isn't bound by no-fly zones on a gesture takeoff, but that DJI doesn't promote the fact. "In that mode the drone can only fly a few meters from you, so the no-fly-zone limit is meaningless."

The Mavic, which DJI launched last year, was already positioned well apart from the older Phantom line — it folds, it's more portable, it shoots 4K video, it has stereo-vision obstacle avoidance. But it never escaped the basic nature of a drone: to take one out with you, you still have to think about what there is to shoot and where is a good place to shoot it.

The Spark breaks with DJI's past products more sharply. First, it is the cheapest new drone DJI sells: the basic kit, without a remote controller, costs 3,299 yuan. DJI's lineup does include the Phantom 3 Standard at only 2,999 yuan, but the Phantom 3 is a product from several years ago that can't avoid obstacles on the ground or ahead of it, and it is big and heavy — its capabilities don't overlap with the Spark's at all.

Second, with drone regulation on the Chinese mainland tightening, the fact that the Spark is entirely free of no-fly-zone limits in gesture mode gives users in big cities a strong reason to buy one. Owning a drone used to mean owning a car as well: without a drive out to the suburbs, the drone just gathered dust. Now it goes in your bag and flies whenever you like, not much different from carrying a second phone.

As the world's largest maker of consumer drones, DJI doesn't need to prove its technology — no other manufacturer has anything like the automatic tracking and intelligent obstacle avoidance already in DJI's products. What DJI needs to find, and prove, is something else: what a drone is actually for, as far as an ordinary consumer is concerned.

What you would buy a drone for has been argued over for a long time. When the Mavic came out we wrote that it lowered the barrier to flying a drone, but that it was still an advanced photography tool without real must-have demand. The Spark may change some of that.

Ordinary consumers don't much want to buy a DSLR, but buying a camera that takes good selfies — or even a phone that takes good selfies — is a purchase motive that has already proven itself: however strong the selfie features on iPhones, Samsungs and Xiaomis, you still see people pull out a Meitu phone specially to take a selfie, then send it back over Bluetooth to post to Moments. If drones used to be DSLRs, the Spark can be thought of as a selfie camera. And no other camera flies, so if you want that first-person kind of video, nothing else will do.

For DJI, the Spark should also be a new experiment in product strategy.

Asked at the Spark launch about the company's future strategy, DJI repeated to QDaily figures it had already made public: revenue of 10 billion yuan in 2016, and cumulative sales in China of 500,000 units since its first-generation product.

Reuters data puts DJI's share of the consumer drone market above 70%, and by DJI's own account consumer products account for 80% of its business. From that you can estimate the global consumer drone market at around 11 billion yuan.

Within consumer electronics that is not a big number. The market for smart wristbands on the Chinese mainland, by comparison, reached 5.6 billion yuan in 2016. Wristbands are cheap and have a wide audience — some sell for under 100 yuan — while drones are expensive. In other words, the group of ordinary consumers who would buy a drone just for fun is small.

That is the setting into which the cheaper Spark arrived. DJI is not the first to try this small-size, photo-and-fun route. The Chinese company Zerotech launched a pocket drone, the Dobby, in 2016, but that iPhone-sized machine wasn't smooth in use: next to DJI's products its hover was unstable, and with no gimbal its photos weren't good either. The product ended up generating little discussion.

There is also a Chinese company called Hover Camera, whose selfie drone is better known — it got its product onto a CCTV news program and into Apple Stores. But the Hover Camera is a small drone made purely for selfies, with under 10 minutes of flight time, and it can't fly like a standard drone. It sells for 3,698 yuan, barely different from the far more capable Spark.

Against the competition, in both technical substance and cost control, the Spark has already proven that DJI is in fact the most technically capable consumer drone company there is. What DJI has to prove now is that drones plus selfies can really be a working business model. Whatever DJI's own plans for its future look like, it still needs to make more money and sign up more users.

Perhaps before long, the bans at theme parks and concerts will read not only "no selfie sticks" but also "no selfie drones."

Photos and video by the author