19 Min battery
1km Range
1080p Stabilized
Brushless Motors
The very popular Hubsan H501s X4 is still a champion of the cheap GPS drones even in 2019.
It's reliable when it comes to positioning, comes with two very good versions of transmitters and has everything from automatic return to home to a very good battery life.
It won't have advanced flight features like waypoints or orbit, but frankly you don't really need them.
Usually, when it comes to more advanced camera drones, they come with a way to stabilize the drone on the spot. I'm talking about GPS or optical flow cameras.
Hubsan H501s: GPS
Battery life for camera drones should be at least 10 minutes per flight.
Take in account spare batteries!
Hubsan H501s: 19minutes is more than enough
Camera resolution isn't everything. Colors, sharpness and bitrate are very important for the overall image.
Hubsan H501s:1080p, video sample below
If I had to pinpoint the most important factor in a camera drone, it would be Image Stabilization. A 4k unstable camera has worse results than a gimbal stabilized 720p one.
Hubsan H501s: no image stabilization
The price for the Hubsan H501s can vary from under $200 to over that amount, the price you can find here is going to be the lowest one I found on the internet.
Here's what you get in the standard package:
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The image quality is quite good, but don't expect anything spectacular like a Mavic Air. You're still paying a very small amount of money afterall and you can't expect stabilized 4k footage for this amount.
In the image above you can see that someone actually took the liberty to go above the clouds with this drone and probably modded some antennas to increase the range.
This is definitely not recommended, but it certanly shows the power of this drone.
There are two main versions you can buy:
You can see the pro version controller in the image above. It does basically the same thing as the standard one, but it has considerably better hobby grade sticks and a better build overal.
It also comes with a sunshade and a better format in my opinion.