A while ago on a post about drones I mentioned the Xiaomi drone as a possible entry level alternative to the DJI Phantom series, but said I hadn’t been able to find many reviews that were much use and it wasn’t that cheap. Well since then I found out a bit more about it and managed to pick one up pretty cheap (I paid £320 with an extra battery, spare props and prop guards).

Since there’s not much useful out there I thought I’d write up my findings – there’s a first impressions report based on the maiden flight on my website if anyone is interested (it’s quite long so you might want a cuppa).

Xiaomi Mi Drone first flight report

I’ll be updating this as I get a few more miles on it.

Interesting! Looks nice. Any photos of the actual drone?

In part of your vid, when the camera was pointing at the grass and flying overhead, the white balance appeared to keep changing. It seemed to be going from cool to quite warm and back again. Could be frustrating if you were using it for ‘critical’ work.

Yeah – the auto white balance was basically crap. I think from now on I’ll be setting it manually (there are a few presets to choose from) then adjusting in post. There’s no raw / D-Log type video output sadly, but I’m not at that stage of advanced yet anyway.

Only a crappy phone pic so far, I’ll get some proper ones when I have it out at the weekend.