Hi
As the title suggests. Obviously try to find an aircraft with low hours and a careful owner. I know batteries are very hard to source. Any major problem areas? I'm coming from phantom experience.

The main DJI support page only gives FAQ listings now so where would I go to get the most current aircraft/controller firmware? Any compatability issues with the most recent DJI GO app - I'd be using iOS devices for this.

If I went for a v2 initially I'd like the option to upgrade to the X5 later on - is the Gimbal carrier compatable? I know I'd need to get the landing gear extensions if they weren't supplied with the aircraft.

Talking of the X5 - sorry this probably should be a seperate thread - are the balance rings still available for the 3rd party lenses and are more lenses compatable than those published at time of launch?

Thanks in advance - Mike

Assuming that the bird is fully functional, the communication with RC established firmly and video feed solid at reasonable (1 km) distance, there's not much to worry about. As long as existing FW is assuring reliable performance of the drone under Go app control, there's no need to upgrade. The shape of batteries, however, is the most critical aspect of successful Inspire 1 usage these days. You can monitor their performance (voltage drop on individual cells, temperature etc.) on dedicated app page, but to find new battery is next to impossible.

Upgrade to X5 camera will require gimbal suspension modification (as opposed to X3 camera mount). The required hardware is hard to find, but possible. Third party balancing rings for lenses are available on eBay. Good luck!
Inspire 1- DJI Download Center- DJIwww.dji.com › downloads › products › inspire-1

Matthew Dobrski Posted at 8-7 12:16
Assuming that the bird is fully functional, the communication with RC established firmly and video feed solid at reasonable (1 km) distance, there's not much to worry about. As long as existing FW is assuring reliable performance of the drone under Go app control, there's no need to upgrade. The shape of batteries, however, is the most critical aspect of successful Inspire 1 usage these days. You can monitor their performance (voltage drop on individual cells, temperature etc.) on dedicated app page, but to find new battery is next to impossible.

Upgrade to X5 camera will require gimbal suspension modification (as opposed to X3 camera mount). The required hardware is hard to find, but possible. Third party balancing rings for lenses are available on eBay. Good luck!

Thanks Matthew

I could plumb for a Inspire 1 Pro with X5 already mounted - there are a few re-sellers offering  money back guarantees and a few months warranty so they seem like the best bet. Worth the peace of mind over a cheaper ebay purchase I think.

From back when I owned one, the biggest issue I had with it was the video feed was unreliable

The fix to that was generally to take off the nose cone and make sure all the connections were fully plugged in, and that got it going for another while.

Other than that, it was a fairly reliable piece of kit.

However, if I were you, I wouldnt buy one now, there are plenty of second hand Inspire 2's on ebay which perform far better than the I1.
or if its an issue of money, id really suggest going for a mavic 2 pro or the like instead. the camera quality is as good or better, with better battery life and a form factor thats simple to carry with you when youre out.

Mike9129 Posted at 8-7 13:08
From back when I owned one, the biggest issue I had with it was the video feed was unreliable

The fix to that was generally to take off the nose cone and make sure all the connections were fully plugged in, and that got it going for another while.

Thanks Mike
Been drawn in by the dream of an Inspire style drone, but realistically not in my price range yet as a practical bird. There are a number of Phantom 4 pro’s popping up that tick all the boxes so might go down that route. I should add this would see occasional commercial use and I’ve a Mavic Air 2 for the lightweight work.

Smashey1 Posted at 8-10 21:17
Thanks Mike
Been drawn in by the dream of an Inspire style drone, but realistically not in my price range yet as a practical bird. There are a number of Phantom 4 pro’s popping up that tick all the boxes so might go down that route. I should add this would see occasional commercial use and I’ve a Mavic Air 2 for the lightweight work.

Image quality wise, Inspire 1 Pro will be a step or two back from what Mavic Air 2 is offering. Only X5R camera attached to Inspire 1 may provide consideration worthy image quality upgrade for serious filming/photography. You'll not benefit from a Phantom 4 Pro class as well, although this particular drone is still prized for commercial mapping due to a mechanical shutter camera. In other words, if you're just fascinated by the mighty power of Inspire's flight and look, go for it by all means. It's a pure joy ... But only Inspire 2 will offer significant imaging advantages above Mavic Air 2.

Matthew Dobrski Posted at 8-12 09:25
Image quality wise, Inspire 1 Pro will be a step or two back from what Mavic Air 2 is offering. Only X5R camera attached to Inspire 1 may provide consideration worthy image quality upgrade for serious filming/photography. You'll not benefit from a Phantom 4 Pro class as well, although this particular drone is still prized for commercial mapping due to a mechanical shutter camera. In other words, if you're just fascinated by the mighty power of Inspire's flight and look, go for it by all means. It's a pure joy ... But only Inspire 2 will offer significant imaging advantages above Mavic Air 2.

Thanks Matthew. Think its time to start saving

Smashey1 Posted at 8-12 23:44
Thanks Matthew. Think its time to start saving

X5r's quality is similar to the i2's x7 apart 6k and higher fps 4k. Look on youtube of their comparison video. However, you need to learn how to color grade if you don't yet because that will make your footage better than most commercial drones out there.

If you're buying online then no way to test manual atti mode to find out the inspire's alignment and if the esc or ncore are not faulty. 3 factors can make the inspire have an imbalance flying, misaligned arms or faulty esc or ncore (either been crashed or got wet) which results to some degradation.

The best inspire 1 would be a v2 and its battery or batteries must have low cycles and balanced cells should be within .2 preferably.

High cycle inspires with many hundreds or a thousand landings will have issues on the battery and the 4 plastic legs cracking and leaking oil, which are replacable if you have no skill soldering then an authorized dji shop can do it for you. The i1 plastic leg parts are cheap but the i1 battery is the exp

Thanks guys for all the advice - still love the idea of the Inspire finding its way into my stable - sorry that should read Hanger shouldn't it.

In the meantime picked up a mint Phantom 4 Pro Obsidian and that should expand my horizons while I save for the Inspire 2

I have a brace of inspires, a mk 1 and mk 2 pro. I use them for wildlife counting and monitoring. Though the mavic pro's, air and mini i have are superb, the inspire is my go to, its just so much fun to fly, and i fly for fun as much as for the monitoring jobs i planned for them. Other then wind bucking the mavic pro is just as good - i have 2 of them and they are superb. On paper they also buck the wind just as well but in reality, from my experience the inspires, being bigger and heavier are just better. I am flying in the Scotish mountains and so the wind throws all kinds of problems and can be calm in one valley and hellish in the next. Though the mavic pro has a longer flight time, practically the higher average speed of the inspire means we can do the usual flight routes faster with the inspire, it travels between the deer lawns and clearings faster so though flight times are shorter it does the job quicker. The mavic does them brilliantly, and has way better reception and video feedback, so should be the goto drone but there is just something about the inspire i enjoy. That said i had a spectacular inspire failure.
I was on the mountain, monitoring red deer herd movements. Conditions were ok, a little misty but more or less windless. Midges and flies were hellish! I had flown just over 6500 meters, in a series of legs, basically out and back checking various forest clearings, with me almost at the centre. I was just coming back from the last check point, my pal started chatting to me about what we had seen so i pressed return to home and it was doing fine. 13 minutes into the flight, 32% left in the battery and 320 meters out we saw it approaching at 118 meters (high so not to spook the deer) and it decided to lower its landing gear, which i thought was unusual. It stopped flight and hovered whilst it did this. A critical battery warning flashed, the screen went dead, and it fell like a rock, into a small valley behind some trees. Left thumb was now on the up lever, to no effect. It had clearly lost all power.
It took a while to find, as though the flight logs showed its last location, it was tough going to find, which we did, upside down in tall reeds, in one piece. The reed, heather and undergrowth were almost shoulder high in places and 2 of us took 2 hours with 2 dogs to search it. I flew 2 other drones over the area but they could see nothing. My pal almost stepped on it to find it. It was only 5 meters from where the line showed it to be, perhaps as a result of very light winds high up i guess. The battery, when turned back on still had 29 % in it, but it had been off since it fell for some reason. We recovered it back to the lodge by argocat, checked it over but it was unmarked, as were all the props. I changed battery, and it flew perfectly. I struggle to believe it fell 118/119 meters and is undamaged. I gave it another flight, with a full battery, but just short range, and then tried the dodgy battery in my inspire 1 pro, and it flew fine as well, though i did notice in both cases the battery did not click in, like all my other batteries do, so wonder if this is the issue. I struggle to believe this, as the battery pins are long, but clearly it suffered a power issue, and of course the telemetary shows nothing - it had literally no power for whatever reason. The 3 shorter pins may be the issue i guess and will do some research today. I would be interested to hear if anyone has any similar stories, or can add any insight to my issue. I note battery cell 3 was low all flight, i now see this, so think perhaps the effort of lowering the gear may have triggered something. I will flatten the battery, and do some testing and will update with my findings

In response to the above

Flying an inspire is a completely different experience to flying a phantom. Those things are toys by comparison

The inspire 2 is a big step up from the inspire 1.

If you go with the inspire 1, the x3 camera is a waste of time.
Similarly, I'd you go with the inspire 2, the x4s is a waste on that drone even tho its not a terrible camera.

The x5 camera on the inspire 1 is ok, only because you can change the lenses. If you've eve used a Panasonic GH4 then it's pretty much the same thing.

The x5s is a decent step up, its similarly a GH5 equivalent that can shoot in prores or raw with the licences. The difference in video quality between what you'll get with the normal 100mb/s sd card footage vs the prores or raw codec is night and day.

The x7 is a different beast altogether. Someone above compared it to the x5r. That's not a good comparison for the quality. It's close to canons new c300 mkiii in terms of the footage quality. The dynamic range is much higher.

Mike9129 Posted at 8-16 00:28
In response to the above

Flying an inspire is a completely different experience to flying a phantom. Those things are toys by comparison

Thanks Mike

I really appreciate all the tips. My budget is limited as I'm going commercial in a very 'soft' way. I've my SOP and PCC being processed by the Irish Aviation Authority as I type but this won't be my day job.

Looking at the P4P as it technically qualifies for any of the SORA ops I might be doing (where-as my Mavic Air 2 lacks any redundant systems). Think I can work with this for the time being as I'm likely to pick up some basic inspection or survey type jobs to start with. The cinematography side of things is more a personal aspiration for now at least.

I'm guessing you fly professionally here in Ireland. If you are happy perhaps you'd drop me a PM . I'm ethically against the sort or rush to the bottom that has plagued the commercial photography sector. Looking there-fore for some guidance regarding pricing paid work should anyone seek me out.

diver dave Posted at 8-15 12:35
I have a brace of inspires, a mk 1 and mk 2 pro. I use them for wildlife counting and monitoring. Though the mavic pro's, air and mini i have are superb, the inspire is my go to, its just so much fun to fly, and i fly for fun as much as for the monitoring jobs i planned for them. Other then wind bucking the mavic pro is just as good - i have 2 of them and they are superb. On paper they also buck the wind just as well but in reality, from my experience the inspires, being bigger and heavier are just better. I am flying in the Scotish mountains and so the wind throws all kinds of problems and can be calm in one valley and hellish in the next. Though the mavic pro has a longer flight time, practically the higher average speed of the inspire means we can do the usual flight routes faster with the inspire, it travels between the deer lawns and clearings faster so though flight times are shorter it does the job quicker. The mavic does them brilliantly, and has way better reception and video feedback, so should be the goto drone but there is just something about the inspire i enjoy. That said i had a spectacular inspire failure.
I was on the mountain, monitoring red deer herd movements. Conditions were ok, a little misty but more or less windless. Midges and flies were hellish! I had flown just over 6500 meters, in a series of legs, basically out and back checking various forest clearings, with me almost at the centre. I was just coming back from the last check point, my pal started chatting to me about what we had seen so i pressed return to home and it was doing fine. 13 minutes into the flight, 32% left in the battery and 320 meters out we saw it approaching at 118 meters (high so not to spook the deer) and it decided to lower its landing gear, which i thought was unusual. It stopped flight and hovered whilst it did this. A critical battery warning flashed, the screen went dead, and it fell like a rock, into a small valley behind some trees. Left thumb was now on the up lever, to no effect. It had clearly lost all power.
It took a while to find, as though the flight logs showed its last location, it was tough going to find, which we did, upside down in tall reeds, in one piece. The reed, heather and undergrowth were almost shoulder high in places and 2 of us took 2 hours with 2 dogs to search it. I flew 2 other drones over the area but they could see nothing. My pal almost stepped on it to find it. It was only 5 meters from where the line showed it to be, perhaps as a result of very light winds high up i guess. The battery, when turned back on still had 29 % in it, but it had been off since it fell for some reason. We recovered it back to the lodge by argocat, checked it over but it was unmarked, as were all the props. I changed battery, and it flew perfectly. I struggle to believe it fell 118/119 meters and is undamaged. I gave it another flight, with a full battery, but just short range, and then tried the dodgy battery in my inspire 1 pro, and it flew fine as well, though i did notice in both cases the battery did not click in, like all my other batteries do, so wonder if this is the issue. I struggle to believe this, as the battery pins are long, but clearly it suffered a power issue, and of course the telemetary shows nothing - it had literally no power for whatever reason. The 3 shorter pins may be the issue i guess and will do some research today. I would be interested to hear if anyone has any similar stories, or can add any insight to my issue. I note battery cell 3 was low all flight, i now see this, so think perhaps the effort of lowering the gear may have triggered something. I will flatten the battery, and do some testing and will update with my findings

If the telemetry shows a bad cell deviation on cell 3 then that could very well be the cause. Your voltage would have went lower than 3.1vwhich is cutoff point for the battery. Auto return home can still stress the battery if the winds are high velocity. In scotland it isn't hot enough to make the battery fail at 160f or 71c onwards.

I've crashed before but my battery wasn't updated and had no autolimit, also I had a custom fw which removed vertical climb speed limit, laptop tele showed the battery overheated at 71c/160f in combo with high current, a cell failed and lost voltage to 0 and disconnected Rc. As the inspire was free falling really fast, it wanted to throttle up and restabilize but a cell's voltage was still starving at zero and the power was not enough to recover.

Since this huge crash on my first inspire 1, I no longer use the limitless vertical speed custom fw. And also I've updated the battery which auto limits its current whenever it gets low voltage or 2hot...

and I used High altitude props which also contributed to high current demand and high temperature on battery. On sea level basically. I used it for the low noise but it's really not for hard flying at sea level.

It's a very good advantage that you live in cold weather, even if it goes freezing you can warm them up.
An all stock inspire and battery updated inspire however can handle tropical climates no issues at all. Unless the battery is in a bad condition which I think is the case with your crash in scotland.

To make sure you don't get bad cell deviation on new batteries, don't charge them when they're hot until they get to room temp or up to 30celsius is best.
Also your inspire should never go below 20% charge when flying. And storage at 50%


Always show lowest voltage on your battery %.
And hotkey the temperature page for easy access while flying. You won't really have to worry about it with a good working battery that's updated.

Mike9129 Posted at 8-7 13:08
From back when I owned one, the biggest issue I had with it was the video feed was unreliable

The fix to that was generally to take off the nose cone and make sure all the connections were fully plugged in, and that got it going for another while.

If you look at the x5 and x5r comparison on google, there's massive difference on color. The x5r is pretty much a different camera in footage.

In terms of the x7 vs x5r video, it's smoother with higher fps, however quality difference was not much because 4k, it's gonna shine at 6k perhaps. In dynamic range it's slight

diver dave Posted at 8-15 12:35
I have a brace of inspires, a mk 1 and mk 2 pro. I use them for wildlife counting and monitoring. Though the mavic pro's, air and mini i have are superb, the inspire is my go to, its just so much fun to fly, and i fly for fun as much as for the monitoring jobs i planned for them. Other then wind bucking the mavic pro is just as good - i have 2 of them and they are superb. On paper they also buck the wind just as well but in reality, from my experience the inspires, being bigger and heavier are just better. I am flying in the Scotish mountains and so the wind throws all kinds of problems and can be calm in one valley and hellish in the next. Though the mavic pro has a longer flight time, practically the higher average speed of the inspire means we can do the usual flight routes faster with the inspire, it travels between the deer lawns and clearings faster so though flight times are shorter it does the job quicker. The mavic does them brilliantly, and has way better reception and video feedback, so should be the goto drone but there is just something about the inspire i enjoy. That said i had a spectacular inspire failure.
I was on the mountain, monitoring red deer herd movements. Conditions were ok, a little misty but more or less windless. Midges and flies were hellish! I had flown just over 6500 meters, in a series of legs, basically out and back checking various forest clearings, with me almost at the centre. I was just coming back from the last check point, my pal started chatting to me about what we had seen so i pressed return to home and it was doing fine. 13 minutes into the flight, 32% left in the battery and 320 meters out we saw it approaching at 118 meters (high so not to spook the deer) and it decided to lower its landing gear, which i thought was unusual. It stopped flight and hovered whilst it did this. A critical battery warning flashed, the screen went dead, and it fell like a rock, into a small valley behind some trees. Left thumb was now on the up lever, to no effect. It had clearly lost all power.
It took a while to find, as though the flight logs showed its last location, it was tough going to find, which we did, upside down in tall reeds, in one piece. The reed, heather and undergrowth were almost shoulder high in places and 2 of us took 2 hours with 2 dogs to search it. I flew 2 other drones over the area but they could see nothing. My pal almost stepped on it to find it. It was only 5 meters from where the line showed it to be, perhaps as a result of very light winds high up i guess. The battery, when turned back on still had 29 % in it, but it had been off since it fell for some reason. We recovered it back to the lodge by argocat, checked it over but it was unmarked, as were all the props. I changed battery, and it flew perfectly. I struggle to believe it fell 118/119 meters and is undamaged. I gave it another flight, with a full battery, but just short range, and then tried the dodgy battery in my inspire 1 pro, and it flew fine as well, though i did notice in both cases the battery did not click in, like all my other batteries do, so wonder if this is the issue. I struggle to believe this, as the battery pins are long, but clearly it suffered a power issue, and of course the telemetary shows nothing - it had literally no power for whatever reason. The 3 shorter pins may be the issue i guess and will do some research today. I would be interested to hear if anyone has any similar stories, or can add any insight to my issue. I note battery cell 3 was low all flight, i now see this, so think perhaps the effort of lowering the gear may have triggered something. I will flatten the battery, and do some testing and will update with my findings

Sorry to hear about your crash but pleased the Drone was undamaged. Testament to the ruggedness of the Inspire and the quality of Scottish heather!

I take you're point on the speed of the Inspire and it's ability to cover ground.