These types of comments confuse me, because it would be faster to Google it and get an answer in 10 seconds than to post a comment and wait for a response.
Besides, from reading the article, context alone should tell you that DJI is a Chinese drone brand.
Before I visited that website I thought "DJI is a Chinese company that produces cutting edge consumer drones". After visiting that page I think "DJI are morons who don't know how to design landing page, don't buy anything from them".
DJI hires high quality Chinese engineers. Their software is better than what American consumer drone companies manage to push out, and they can push the latest tech to market insanely quick, as GoPro learned the hard way when they found out DJI was a half generation ahead of them on drone tech.
DJI has great customer service, an amazing insurance plan that provides piece of mind, and bullet proof build quality.
They do have a major advantage of being in China, so they can work with suppliers much more directly. It doesn't feel like they are using the grey technology market though. A lot of the lower priced drones are obviously put together from Shenzen part bins, but DJI just feels good all around.
That said, their Android mobile app is a bit janky at times. Then again, lots of stuff on Android is a bit janky...
You keep commenting everywhere after ignoring what people are telling you:
Ignore the price, and the DJI drones are still way better. Even receiving a ton of money from the DoD, Western companies fail to compete with DJI greatly.
> I am interested to experiment with Quadrotors, but I am not sure what options are out there for quadrotors that one can program instead of just controlling them with a remote.
> DJI has become DroneBase’s most important partner. DroneBase requires pilots to exclusively use the Chinese manufacturer’s hardware in order to standardize the footage collected
I think that would be a massive turn off for people here.
DJI's drones are not known for their quality, price, configurability or.... well... anything utilitarian.
A few customers listed here: Delta Drone, Drone America.
Sounds like the market didn't want or need a $2500/yr/drone software package for automating flights/data retrieval/storage. And there's simply no competing at the hardware level with DJI, even with $118M in funding.
"Across all prices in North America, DJI represented 50 percent of the market, Snow says. The price range where DJI is not dominant is drones under $500, which are mostly toys, and where there are hundreds of companies competing." [1]
There's money to be made in industrial (non-warfare) drones - but not as much as everyone thinks, and competition is really tough.
I mean, yeah, he uses a telephone too and has a bog-standard photo frame. Some things are just commodities now... consumer drones are arguably like that. Doesn't really matter that it's DJI or any other company.
Unless there are export restrictions on non-Chinese drones...? But lol, are there even any non-Chinese consumer drone manufacturers still in business or did DJI eat them all?
Besides, from reading the article, context alone should tell you that DJI is a Chinese drone brand.
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