Another DJI victim. As an industry insider, if there ever was a company I'm impressed with is DJI.
Their technical depth and ability to evolve their product and get it to shelves on short cycles is unmatched.
Note drone entrepreneurs - if there's money to be made in drones, DJI will take it to itself.
The thing is that you simply can't compete with the vertical integration of DJI. Taking images and videos is still by far and large the reason to fly drones in the first place, and once you own the vertical stack and can integrate your imagers with the electromechanics (gimbal) you get to a very small and efficienct package.
Think about that: for every gram of camera, you need two grams of stabilizer, then you need four grams of drone and battery to carry that. While DJI just stabilize their optics and sensor, GoPro stabilizes an entire 80g, bulky camera. This is mainly why the Karma is so big and heavy compared to the DJI Mavic (there are some advantages to DJI in propulsion and batteries but those are pretty small; not a lot of proprietary tech in those fields).
Note drone entrepreneurs - if there's money to be made in drones, DJI will take it to itself.
The thing is that you simply can't compete with the vertical integration of DJI. Taking images and videos is still by far and large the reason to fly drones in the first place, and once you own the vertical stack and can integrate your imagers with the electromechanics (gimbal) you get to a very small and efficienct package.
Think about that: for every gram of camera, you need two grams of stabilizer, then you need four grams of drone and battery to carry that. While DJI just stabilize their optics and sensor, GoPro stabilizes an entire 80g, bulky camera. This is mainly why the Karma is so big and heavy compared to the DJI Mavic (there are some advantages to DJI in propulsion and batteries but those are pretty small; not a lot of proprietary tech in those fields).