I am slowly loosing my faith in the quality control at DJI when it comes to the Phantom 4 Pro

I own already an Inspire 1 and a Mavic Pro. Both fly perfect, no connection issues or poor signal problems.

I love the camera of the new Phantom 4 Pro and decided to get one.
My first deal on a P4 Pro was a returned one from Amazon Warehouse which let me save 150 EUR.

Curious about the new camera I setup the drone at my parents property where all my drones did their first flights.
I got the drone into the air but I had a very instable video connection with lots of dopouts and even freezing video.
Even the Radio connection showed poor signal and when the drone disconnected from my remote I decided this was it and returned it to Amazon.
I was able to take some pics and love the image quality of the camera.
And yes I updated the firmware to the latest version, I tried switching to 2,4GHz band for video but nothing improved the poor transmission quality. Even hough there was no quality issue shown in the WLAN screen of the App it was not possible to get a stable connection between rc AND video.
The distance for the whole testing was between 10m and 30m, I would not trust this drone flying over water.

I did not want to give up and decided to get another Phantom 4 Pro, this time I got a brand new unit.
Today I finally had the time to visit my parents and get the new drone ready to fly.
This drone had the same problem with image transmission, video froze or showed bricks of the image. Poor transmission was also an issue. I update the firmware but no change.
On this drone the connection problem seemed even bigger, it was not possible to get a green light on the remote when it was connected with the drone.
The firmware update finished succesfully with DJI Assistent and with the DJI 4 APP.
I did not even get the drone up in the air because I did not get any video on my Samsung Note 4 screen. It would not make sense to try flying the drone without any video transmitting. The poor signal quality which was also displayed for the remote control let me decide to keep this unit grounded.

I got the feeling that there must have been a problem between remote control and receiver in the drone and with the lightbridge which is responsibel for video transmission.
I finally wanted to try and reconnect the remote with the drone.
Even reconnection was not possible. I pressed the three buttons on the remote until the light started flashing blue, then I pushed the reset button on the drone. I watched and waited for some minutes, but the drone would not do the pairing with the remote.

When I was watching the drone and waited for pairing I recognized a strange noise coming from the gimball. The gimball motor made a screeachy noise from time to time. I took the dron in my hand to locate the source of this noise. When I moved the dron slowly I could make the gimball generate this strange sound emission.

Right now I am finished with the Phantom 4 Pro
Either I had bad luck and picked the early Monday morning drones or the Quality Control at DJI has not been around. It is also possible that the first drone was returned to Amazon because the buyer before me had the same problems I had and nobody really checked the drone when it had been returned.
The second one was brand new and I had exactly the same issues.

My Mavic flies very well (also at my parents property) without any weak signal problems, the video was not even interrupted at all. Was I lucky to have a working Maverick?
I have read some reviews of the Phantom 4 Pro on Amazon. One guy mentioned that the fifth drone he received finally worked well.
I also have seen other drone pilots having the same problems I had with the transmission of video and rc signal.

I spent the whole afternoon trying to get the Phantom 4 up into the skies but it finally ended up in its retail box and will be retunred tomorrow. What a waste of time.
Do you have similiar experiences witht he Phantom 4 Pro? I sometimes feel that I by my bad luck always collect the monday machines. When I buy a TV set the first one is not working well, when I buy an Amplifier I have to return the first one since it has a problem.....

I guess I will wait for a used Phantom 4 pro which has been tested and which flies without any problems. I do not have the time to continue playing roulette and order one Phantom every week to tests it at the weekends if it has no tech issues....

Have a nice Sunday evening

Dee

Hi Monty

thanx for the info.
I will send this drone back for sure due to the strange noise coming from the gimball. Don't want to start that way with a new drone.

What really makes me wonder is that the remote cannot be paired anymore with the drone.
I had to pair my Mavic once and that did not take more than 10 seconds and the controller was connected again to the drone.

Interesting.

Interesting. My Phantom 4 was flying flawless, updated the program today and the new program took it straight into a crash. Behaved like a wild bird with rabies

I bought two Phantom 4 Pros today and neither one worked. The Remote would not take any charging at all.

I feel lucky that I got my money back.

I went to other stores and asked to open the package there before purchasing, but was told no, once you buy it, it belongs to you. I would have to chase DJI to get anything taken care of.
I think not. I hope that an Admin sees this thread and helps explain why this is such a common problem today. I saw pages and pages of other P4P owners frustrated that you buy a device and immediately loose it for weeks and weeks, if it's ever fixed at all.

I have lost lots of faith in this company.

I heard that there existed a firmware problem at the time I bought the second drone.
That would explain why it worked before the firmware has been updated and why fans340ce1be crashed his drone which showed this strange behaviour after the firmware update.

Is there anyone from Europe who bought a new Phantom P4 Pro who had no issues at all after the first firmware update?
I do not understand why firmware is released which causes massive problems in video transmission and even signal losses between controller and drone.  Thank god this was not the firmware of an airliner....