Hello,

I'm looking for a drone for my dad. I have a price range of about $500 or less. I'd like a nice controller and maybe even googles for first person, but could buy those after. The use case would be playing around outside, flying over our lake from our boat and getting video of boats and such. I don't know much about sensors and gps capabilities and the differences between different drones. I looked at the DJI mavic mini and the dji phantom 2 v.2 which are both around $500 but any suggestions and information would be very helpful!

thank you

Welcome to the forum. Since this is the first drone for your dad I would suggest maybe finding a used DJI Spark. You can find them in the $250 - $400 range. Since he is new to flying buying something used would be less painful if he happened to crash it (not saying he will but you never know). I'm sure he would feel bad if he crashed a $500-$600 drone. Then after he feels like he has a great fell for the drone you could always sell that one and upgrade to a more feature rich drone.

Hope your dad has fun and good luck.