SwellPro® Spry+ Waterproof Action Drone（Discontinued）

Bought this drone for my husband and he is always out flying it behind the boat. Gets great pictures of our grandson on the water.
Totally waterproof.

Shopping on the manufacturer's website was quick and easy. I always knew exactly where my package was. The tracking option is perfect. I received the product from a Fedex supplier in perfect condition. After unpacking, I used the drone in the pool. It has a very strong structure, a massive little drone. It has an incredible pre-programmed flight feature, I love some of it. My favorite could be the speed of the Spry+, it could also be an FPV drone.
It was a good decision to buy an additional propeller and battery, I use it a lot. For me, the 1080 / 60fps video size is sufficient and the quality is impressive. I’m thinking hard about buying a GL1 FPV Goggle but I’m practicing with the drone without it for now.

Well love the drone it was made for people just getting into drones and for pros all around drone for everything. The video is awesome 4k 30 frames per second. Water proof is a huge plus for us that do a lot of boating. I have several g Gopro cameras but they can't fly so the Spry+ drone was the fix for that problem. I have not be able to connect it to my I Phone but it has a remote control box that works just fine. I will see if i can find more information on the phone hook up but for now you can't go wrong with this drone. I also made a short video of my first time flying this drome it was windy 5 to 15 mph but the drone did a great job using gps mode. The follow me mode works great and circle mode also not one problem with any of the functions on the remote control. I for one think for the price this is a awesome drone it is not a 3000 dollar or more drone it is under a grand and you get a lot for that. Some people think it should be like best drone ever made that is not the case it is something most people can afford and have fun with and make some nice youtube videos and no other drone is water proof so tell the high dollar drone to try dropping in the water see what happen to that 5000 dollar drone haha Thanks SwellPro for making a awesome drone

Great unit especially for boat use ie wet landings.
Only issue I have is the android phone app won't load maps. Development team is looking into it

Over all this is a great drone for something be with little experience. Instruction manual is informative yet in some areas vague. Camera takes amazing footage, have had som issues with corrupted files on micro sd which is probably my error. I haven’t tested in water just yet but as soon as I’m comfortable that will be tested. Overall very well built, however I recommend buying extra lens domes due to it is exposed on the nose of the drone and the glass is thin. The video feed to the remote has static but may improve with less equipment around to interfere.
I purchased this particular drone for taking to the lake and getting footage of wakeboarding, lounging and all around fun. With the nice case that comes with it I will easily be able to stow it in my boat worry free.

This is a review after a couple of days of operation. I could not test the in- or on-water performance. If you are happy with a basic video function, Spry+ definitely is for you, even if not needing the waterproof design.

Drone
The Spry+ as a drone is an out-of-the box experience, all of us would like to happen more often. Spry+ flies well and predictable, it is utmost easy to land (after sensor calibration). Position stability is excellent, regarding the sensor principles. Typically Spry+ holds position with an accuracy of better than half a meter in GPS mode. A very few times accuracy is worse but never exceeding 1 meter!
Flight time is about 13 minutes. When flying dynamically all the time, flight time is reduced to say, 10 minutes. I did not reach the edge yet but I suspect Spry+ to reach 16 to 18 minutes of flight time when flying moderate.

Flight modes
Return to home follows the RC transmitter. Great function! Keep in mind, that after reaching the transmitter's position in height of 30 meters above, the drone will enter a straight decent on position. So pay attention and re-enter GPS mode, when return to home gets into it's final decent stage in order to steer Spry+ from a moving boat.
ATTI mode adds some kind of agility for flying. So this is like a moderate fun-fly-booster. Concerning video shots ATTI mode is useless, see underneath.
Circle flight is doing it's job, however, you have to fly precisely over the object you want to circumfly when enabling circle flight. Many scenes won't make it into memory, e.g. if you want to circle the people, crowding a trees bottom because you have to involve circle flight at the treetop. Result is a circle flight around slightly above the treetop rather than the people.
Follow-me-mode. Spry+ is suggested to film backwards, so flying ahead the object to follow. This only happens, if the objects moves precisely towards the drone. Deviations of that path cause the drone to change to follow afterwards.

Photo: The camera does a decent job with factory settings. Images are definitely photographer-style looking with no bing-bang-blingbling artificially saturated colors and much-to-steep contrasts. Automatic color balance is... perfect, even more for the budget. Just great. The low-light performance could be better, but hey, this is a drone with a camera with reasonable budget opposed to multifold-budgeted cameras with excellent low-light performance.

For manual camera settings the SwellCam2 App enters the stage. That's when trouble starts. The so called WIFI (enabling) knob on Spry+' downside starts a very short video recording in most cases. Enabling the WIFI access point is, what the knob is suggested to be for. On average, 8 button presses and videos are needed to activate Spry+' WIFI.

Video
Sadly the video function suffers from several issues. Bottom line: you won't manage to shoot nice videos within dynamic flight:
The field of view is great for photos but too narrow for videos, especially vertically. Accelerating the drone in either way kicks the objects to be filmed out of the image area most of the times.
Things get worse when enabling the camera's tilt function. With a smooth motion of the gimbal the videographer might manage to keep objects in the image even when flying dynamically. However, the gimbal performs awful in means of a rough, step-kind of vertical movement. In no way one might use that camera movement in video presentation. I asked support, whether my drone's gimbal might be faulty or works as designed but did not get an answer yet.

Image stabilization
Spry+ is featured with an image stabilization function. I could not detect any effect at all.

So my 4 stars are derived from the excellent flying characteristics - fun - and photo function. Unnecessarily, manual camera setting are annoying due to the undocumented WIFI button function. Video functionality is a toy or for static shots only.

Adding to the Spry+ a gimbal keeping the promise a gimbal should, even if tilt only, the Spry+ was a must have.

Wolfram