The drone market starts to boom there are termendous new products and accessories. Every camera manufactorer now wants so make drone camera - but they do it for the Go Pro mounting system.

DJI has its own system and no one (can?) bring products for it. DJI wants that you must buy everything only from them. Its like Beta vs VHS in the 80s. Beta was much better BUT as Sony wanted to collect all the money themselves why far inferior JVC VHS system let in all others in their system who won?

I am seeing here the same now. DJI has still the best products BUT where is the FLIR cam? One year Inspire 1 and no cam? You soon get many of them for Go Pro mounting. Hasselblad is starting with drone cams and so are many others. Any Go Pro compatible drone will have plenty of accessories while the quality of drones of other manufactorers get equally to the Phantom3.

I cannot even get a high quality CP filter for the Inspire. (dont come with Polarpro i have enough of their bad quality)

Things will get better. You never know what DJI has up their sleeves and I mean this in a positive way too! DJI is not a bad company and in fact turn out an amazing product.

Read this article.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/23/ ... ection=money_latest


If anyone's going to be in trouble soon it's GoPro in fact they already are. Very much so! Everybody and their brother wants to start a drone company now. And all the small start ups are going to end up hurting each other.  For instance what will happen to 3DR when GoPro goes into direct competition with them. 3DR's  newest flagship is built completely around the GoPro  and now GoPro pro is going to become their competitor. How is that relationship going to work out? I'm not sure but we will see soon.

DJI's best-selling drone the Phantom 1 and Phamtom 2 were built to use the GoPro. But not anymore, not any of our newest Phantoms. I think that has hurt GoPro quite a bit.


Dave

Obviousely most drone startups will fail. Thats out of question. But some make rather good drones also. What hurts Go Pro most is the bad quality of their cameras, of course it hurts them DJI does not use them anymore it also hurts them real camera manufacturers start to make cameras for drones.

Its not the Go Pro camera which is the standard but the mounting plate which so many use now. I would avoid at all to buy a Go Pro camera but other manufacturers make nice stuff for their mounting plate.

The Go Pro 4K camera makes really poor pictures in all videos I have seen and in any comparison. But the good thing is you dont need to use a Go Pro camera in a Go Pro compatible drone.

Anyway I like the DJI products I just would like to have more to choose from like FLIR camera, more filters, bigger batteries, ..........

In relative terms very few GoPro cameras ever find their way onto a UAV - it is a small part of their market, but one that is valuable for marketing purposes.
Having said that, I agree that DJI would be very smart to open up the physical and electronic interface for the X series cameras to third parties.
This would drive adoption of the Inspire/Inspire Pro and Matrice platforms, where DJI would make much more margin than selling cameras only.

A great example of this dates back to 1981 with the release of the IBM 5150, the first PC.
It was expensive, low powered (but amazing at the time) and didn't have much of a market at the time (sound familiar?).
But IBM opened up the ISA interface to 3rd party hardware devs who soon came up with a vast array of cards which meant that people could customise their PC to their specific use case.

Six or so months later, DEC launched the Rainbow 100 which completely blew the spec of the PC away - it could run multiple OSs, had colour display and Hard drive support as standard, all of which cost big $$ to add to the PC. DEC however kept the hardware interface proprietary and closed. I worked for DEC at this time as a hardware tech and never once saw a 3rd party card in a Rainbow. In face I never saw a Rainbow at a customer that wasn't already a VAX site. They had a great product, but kept it closed and it didn't catch on.

Had DEC opened up the hardware spec on the Rainbow, we might have had a different computing history over the past 30 or so years!