Hands On With the New DJI Spark

Now that DJI’s new mini Spark drone has been officially announced, the early reviews are starting to appear. Photo industry personality Kai Wong got his hands on a pre-release prototype, and his video provides a great early look at the drone.

Kai’s humor (note: there’s some strong language) makes this an entertaining demo of DJI’s new “ickle, little” quadcopter. He seems impressed with the drone as he kicks off the video with some beautiful panning shots at Mam Tor in northern England, showing just how well the 2-axis stabilization works.

As Kai shows, the Spark is tiny. Unfortunately, the props can’t be folded down to better fit in a pocket, but it still significantly smaller than the Mavic.

“The build quality is… well, it uses a lot of plastic, but you need that, to keep it light, to make it airborne. You can’t have one made of gold,” Kai quips. “But it’s solid plastic, it’s good quality plastic, it’s fantastically plastic.”

At 4:29, Kai demonstrates “Gesture Mode”, which allows you to launch and control the drone without using your phone. The drone can take off and land in your hand, instructed to follow you, directed with your hands, and will take a ‘selfie’ of you if you make a rectangle with your fingers:

Kai concludes that despite lacking 4K, the image quality is “pretty good”, and the drone produces “beautiful, stabilised drone footage”.

The full review is at the top for your watching pleasure. As always, if you like the cut of Kai’s jib, you can check out his YouTube channel for more reviews and tips. The Spark is also available now for $499.