Parrot presents ANAFI and aims to challenge DJI Mavic and Spark
A foldable drone inspired by flying insects: here is Parrot ANAFI, which after two years of development aims to give DJI and its Mavic Air and Spark a hard time. It runs in 4K HDR and shoots 21 megapixel images and offers automated maneuvers.
It seemed that the competition had been dumbfounded by the latest Chinese DJI products: the most striking case was perhaps GoPro Karma, drone first announced by the action camera leader and then withdrawn. In the last few years, the French of Parrot have held on to our latitudes, focusing heavily on professional fixed-wing products, but continuing to develop behind the scenes something that could also battle the DJI’s quadcopter consumer.
Parrot ANAFI, this is the name of the new proposal of the transalpine brand. It will be interesting to try it and see it live, but from the first details, it seems an aircraft that can give a hard time to products like Mavic Air. Parrot ANAFI also points to a foldable design.
Interesting the choice of the French, who were inspired by flying insects such as hymenoptera, and have focused on an asymmetric design of the folding arms that hold engines and propellers. The design is tripartite between the head (where the gimbal is housed with the camera), the chest (which integrates the electronics) and the abdomen, which houses the battery.
The weight of 320 grams is really low and makes it hard to go beyond the category of ‘three hundred’. The gimbal stabilized on three axes houses a f/2.4 camera with Sony IMX230 sensor, managed by an Ambarella processor to record 4K HDR video at 30fps and 4K Cinema (4,096×2,160 pixels) at 24 fps and shoot images at 21 Megapixels. The camera can be oriented from +/- 90° vertically and +/-40° horizontally and also offers digital stabilization to minimize the impact of vibration and movement.
The camera uses a field angle of 110° for wide-angle shots, but can shoot at a reduced resolution of 12 megapixel photos without the distortion typical of that type of optics. You can also store the DNG-RAW in addition to the JPEG image. In video, movies can be taken by taking advantage of the entire sensor, for wide-angle shots, or with cutouts in 4K and 1080p, which offer a zoom without loss of detail of 1.4x and 2.8x.
The lithium polymer battery allows a range of 25 minutes and can be recharged directly from the drone via the USB-C port. Parrot has redesigned the propellers for a quieter flight. The drone can be driven via the Parrot Skycontroller 3 radio control on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, with automatic switching on less crowded channels, arriving in open field up to 4km of useful range.
Parrot has also developed a new app – FreeFlight 6 – that offers automated maneuvers, such as SmartDronies and CineShots, in the wake of what the competition offers. This speech is similar to the Follow Me function, on which Parrot technicians worked thanks to the use of a neural network that was ‘trained’ using a large database of people and vehicles.
The drone can fly with winds up to 50km/h and has a maximum speed of 55km/h. The new Parrot ANAFI available at a price of $699.99.
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