Before the launch of the recent AOSENMA CG033, the Mavic Pro was the smallest camera-equipped quadcopter in the high-quality drone line-up. The successor to the throne is likely to be similar to the AOSENMA’s Mavic Pro in spirit. The Chinese company AOSENMA is best known for its amazing range of affordable, easy-to-fly drones, and the AOSENMA CG033 offers many of the same benefits, specs, and features.
So you get not only a decent flight time, but also long-range remote control, a live video feed of the drone’s viewpoint beamed to your smartphone and stable and crystal clear video recording – but in a more easily portable and foldable package.
Despite its decent size, the AOSENMA CG033 remains extremely portable and weighs a mere 0.35 kilograms and dimensions of 15.35 x 15.35 x 2.76 inches making it compact enough to slip into any bag.
It comes with a battery delivering around 80 minutes of working time per charge and a flight time of 20 minutes, plus it has a fast top speed. A 1080p Wi-Fi enables camera mounted on a 3-axis gimbal, and a compact remote control that works in tandem with your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. There are two options when you buy the camera, one with the camera and the other one without it.
The below is a review of the original AOSENMA CG033model.
AOSENMA CG033– Design
Having flown drones from AOSENMA’s wide range extensively, I considered them to be impressively compact and lightweight for their capabilities and performance – but the AOSENMA CG033is in a whole different league when it comes to portability due to its awesome folding feature. You can literally fold the whole thing and stick it in your backpack.
When we received the package we thought there’d been some mistake – surely this package, smaller than a shoebox, couldn’t contain a quadcopter, a controller, and a battery charger? But it did because this drone is shockingly tiny compared to its other competitor drones. The packaging was not the very impressive, a simple cardboard box with a small plastic material which contained the drone and its accessories.
My immediate concern was that the AOSENMA CG033’s small size would detract from its in-air stability and/or its image quality. But even with that nagging concern in the back of mind, I was really impressed by how neatly the drone and its controller folded down.
I truly felt that the AOSENMA CG033 was the first drone that felt like it could easily be carried around all day without any thought.
Most drones require being lugged around in special, bulky backpacks or cases, but the AOSENMA CG033 will happily fit in the smallest of bags.
It’s has a great solid build quality and looked sturdy especially due to the fact that the majority of the quadcopter is constructed from tough plastic – which is great because newbie’s or first-timers who buy a drone are likely to have at least one or two in-flight mishaps during their ownership.
AOSENMA CG033– Features
The AOSENMA CG033’s camera is small but fairly powerful: it can capture 1080p stills in JPEG or DNG RAW format, as well as video at a variety of resolutions and frame rates: It’s mounted on a tiny gimbal that, in combination with the drone’s suite of sensors, is able to make near-instant adjustments to keep itself level at all times. You can also set it to a POV mode, which tilts and turns it along with the drone.
Through the AOSENMA CG033 mobile app, you will have access to its intelligent flight modes. By enabling the “Smart Follow” feature, the drone will follow the movements of your phone, keeping the preset relative distance between the drone and phone. Note: The AOSENMA CG033 drone does not have an obstacle avoidance feature, so it can easily bump into trees and buildings! Thus, you will have to look out for those things yourself.
Trajectory flight, also known as Way-point flight mode is also a cool feature. Draw a flight path on the phone APP, and the aircraft will fly from the starting point to the end point according to the route. Note: Before starting, this autonomous flight mode, always checks the route for obstacles!
For photography, the AOSENMA CG033 has many cool features such as hand gestures photography and gesture recording are also built into the camera.
Then there’s the tiny controller, on the top of which is a small grip which will hold your smartphone in place. The video will be transmitted on your smartphone from the drone’s camera; it will show everything in its view and will help you guide the drone. This way, you can view the drone camera’s live feed (in smooth-running, crisp 1080p) and change settings via the AOSENMA app on your phone’s screen while keeping the physical flight controls within reach.
It has a long transmission range, too – AOSENMA says up to 500 meters, depending on obstacles and other interference. I haven’t attempted to test that out, as flying a drone beyond visual range would be very dangerous and difficult to do.
AOSENMA CG033– Performance
How does the AOSENMA CG033fly? Effortlessly – and fast. Flick it into flight mode and it’ll hit a frankly scary 40mph (at a loss of that obstacle collision, mind), but even with its regular settings, it’s a responsive, spry flier, acting instantly on your control inputs. Despite this speed, it’s possible to make precise changes too – important if you’re fussy about your footage. As mentioned before, it has a Smart Follow feature by which, the drone will track the movement of your phone. It also has a Trajectory Flight mode. You can turn on this mode and draw a path for the drone to follow on the smartphone app and the drone will follow that path to the letter.
It also ascends and descends at a satisfyingly rapid rate, letting you get it in position for those all-important aerial shots and videos without taking up too much of the battery life.
Real-life battery timings accurately reflect the manufacturers’ claims, so in regular mode, you can expect around 20 to 25 minutes of airtime per charge.
Recharging a fully discharged battery to full charge takes about two hours, so it might be worth investing in additional batteries (at £85 a pop) if you’re planning on long flying sessions out and about.
Video footage and photos, meanwhile turn excellent and frankly better than I had expected. The 1080p pictures are so sharp and clean that you’ll scarcely believe they came from such a small camera, while 1080p clips lack some of that impact but make up for it with the smoothness of the shutter that, in some cases, you might find preferable.
I didn’t notice any major issues with rolling shutter – merely some slight juddering when panning.
The JPEGs are also gloriously impactful – although zooming in close on your computer screen reveals that the images aren’t the cleanest or sharpest. You can also shoot in RAW, of course, which should allow you much more scope to tweak and “fix” problematic photos.
The one problem I had was the camera gets somewhat out of level and that really impacted the nature of the shot I would be aiming to take.
Worth noting, though: the physical tininess of the camera sensor means that you’re much better off doing any shooting during the day, because when things get dim there’s an awful lot of noise in both photos and videos, detracting heavily from the detail, color, and contrast.
In terms of the controller, it would sometimes not do the desired action like for example if wanted to take the drone up a little further, but instead of doing that it would just hover in the same spot for a bit while I tried to move the gimbal around. When I switched from GPS mode to normal mode, the drone would for some reason descend all of a sudden, so its best you don’t switch to normal mode mid-flight to avoid the chance of accidents.
Should I buy the AOSENMA CG033?
Having tested out my fair share of drones, I can say with confidence that AOSENMA is a great value option, given its price tag of a mere $160, where others cost around thousands of dollars.
The features such as Smart Follow could definitely use some improvement. In my case, I noticed that once I turned on the smart follow mode, the camera maintained its distance and position on the target, and if the target moved the camera did not adjust accordingly and didn’t even turn fully and again with this mode as well, the camera would completely out of whack once the target began moving.
While the AOSENMA CG033 lacks features like zoom or 360-degree obstacle detection, which are both rumored to appear on its successors, it still shoots excellent video and pictures stills that are likely good enough for most non-professional aerial photographers.
AOSENMA’s remains our pick at the $200 mark. If you’re not after something quite so advanced, but something that is travel-friendly and will not force you to carry around a bunch of extra bags, then this drone is definitely worth the buy and you should definitely consider it. It has pretty much all the features a high-end drone has to offer, so if you want to get a feel for drones and good features, this one is definitely worth considering.
If you are interested in buying this product, visit the following link:
Buy AOSENMA CG033 on Gearbest
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