DJI’s Avata 360 is a more functional, flexible 360 drone
DJI’s Avata 360 finds the company at a strange time. On the one hand, it’s been beaten to the punch: Antigravity’s A1 became the first 360-degree drone when it launched last December, and DJI is playing catch-up. But it’s also the last DJI drone you might be able to buy legally in the US, following the FCC’s de facto ban, and even then it won’t see an official release in the country.
This means that if you’re in the US, the Antigravity A1 remains the best (and only) option for a 360-degree flying camera. But in the rest of the world, the Avata 360 makes a good case: it’s faster than the A1, serves as both a 360 drone and a traditional FPV model, and offers the option of glasses and motion controller controls, a classic dual-stick setup, or a smartphone screen. Add to that the fact that both main lenses are (easily) user replaceable, and I suspect most flyers will find they prefer DJI’s format to Antigravity’s attempt.
The Avata 360 is available now in China, but is expected to start shipping elsewhere in April. It starts from just £409 / €459 (around $540) to get the drone alone, well below the $1,599 asking price of the cheapest Antigravity bundle, although it does include glasses and a motion controller. DJI’s Motion Fly More Combo is the closest equivalent, with N3 Goggles, a Motion 3 RC controller, and extra batteries, but at £829/€939 (around $1,100) it’s still significantly cheaper than the Antigravity. The quality of the headsets plays a role here, however: there is no official bundle including DJI’s Goggles 3, which are a closer analogue to the Antigravity headset, and adding it to your setup would bring the price more in line.
All of this may be a moot point if you live in the US, where DJI has no plans to officially launch its product via its own website. This is despite the fact that the Avata 360 received clearance from the FCC in December – and was the last DJI drone to do so. This means it will be legal, and likely possible, to purchase the Avata 360 from importers and fly it in the United States, which likely won’t be the case for any of DJI’s future drone releases. But like the recent Neo 2 and other recent drones, DJI itself will not sell it.
Simply put, the Avata 360 is quite similar to the A1, the first drone from the Insta360 Antigravity sub-brand. This is a fairly compact and lightweight drone equipped with two lenses that combine to produce 360-degree photos and 8K videos. These can be viewed as is, or you can use the app to edit footage in traditional formats, allowing you to choose which part of the image to use at any given moment. This is basically the drone version of fixing it in post-production, allowing you to fly without thinking too much and think about the footage after the fact.
Beyond that, the two drones actually differ quite a bit, so I took both to fly together for a direct comparison. The Avata 360 is heavier, at 455g, putting it well above the 250g line that affects flight regulations in many countries. It’s also larger, with a fixed body, compared to the foldable A1. This does, however, have its advantages: built-in propeller guards, making it a more resilient drone in case something goes wrong. It’s also capable of flying further (up to 20 km / 12 miles in ideal conditions, double the A1’s maximum range) and faster (with a top speed in sport mode of 18 m/s or 40 mph, an additional 2 m/s or 5 mph, allowing it to avoid some of the A1’s slightly floaty and unresponsive sensations in flight). Battery life is roughly equivalent, with 23 minutes of flight time listed on the 360 and 24 for the A1.
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DJI’s drone has a slight edge in video quality, with larger camera sensors, wider aperture lenses and the ability to use its full 8K resolution at 60fps, while the Antigravity’s 8K recording tops out at 30fps, dropping to 5.2K if you want 60fps. But the biggest advantage of Avata 360 is its flexibility. While the A1 can only be used for 360-degree filming because its two cameras are fixed, the Avata 360 relies on a pivoting gimbal, allowing the drone to face a single lens forward for a more traditional FPV experience. In single-lens mode, the A1 records up to 4K and 60fps, cropping to deliver images in the standard 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio and avoiding any distortion effects at the edge of the frame due to the extremely wide lens. I haven’t tried enough of DJI’s more capable single-lens drones to know how directly the image quality compares, although I suspect they’ll always be superior, but at first glance the Avata 360’s single-lens option doesn’t seem like a compromised experience.
To get the most out of FPV mode, the 360 is also compatible with all kinds of control methods: you can use the DJI app on your phone, an official controller (the RC 2 is included in some bundles), or a goggle and motion controller setup. Beginners may more enjoy Antigravity’s immersive 360-degree experience with motion controls, where you can mostly just move around the sky, looking one way while the drone flies another, activated by simple point-and-click controls, safe in the knowledge that you’ll have filmed the whole thing and can choose later. Flying either drone like this is incredibly simple and intuitive, with no need to learn complex controls – you can pretty much just fly into the air and go (well, after a bit of fumbling with starting and connecting each item in the setup separately, which is still a headache). But DJI’s drone also lets you grab a dual-stick controller and switch to single-lens mode for more advanced flight and full camera control. Antigravity’s drone has long been promised dual-stick pad support, but it has yet to come to fruition.
The Avata 360 also offers another important upgrade: user-replaceable lenses. The outer element of each of the drone’s two main lenses can be removed and replaced if damaged, a process I was able to complete in less than five minutes. It requires nothing more than the basic tools included in the £25/€25 (around $30) DJI kit, and while it can be a bit fiddly, it’s not technical at all. This is a pretty significant improvement in the repairability of the drone, and we hope to see it repeated in other DJI drones in the future.
The 360-degree footage can be edited after the fact in the DJI app, which offers a fairly intuitive and beginner-friendly way to browse and create quick clips and highlights, although it will clearly take some practice to produce something more refined. Years later, the DJI app as a whole remains a problem, at least on Android: it’s not available on the Play Store, seems to switch between portrait and landscape modes at will, and freezes every time I open the screen of the Oppo foldable phone I’m testing at the moment. Considering that Antigravity is just a drone, it’s a bit embarrassing that its app seems the more polished of the two.
Yet in many ways, DJI now has the advantage – at least outside the United States. Unless you really need a smaller, lighter drone that sits below the 250g line, it would be hard to justify paying more for Antigravity’s offering. Its app is a little better, its headset more comfortable and full-featured, but for the most part the DJI’s combination of functionality, flexibility, and repairability will likely outweigh those benefits. Don’t expect to see one appear on the shelves of your local Best Buy.
Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge
