Parrot EXTENDS its ANAFI Drone Offering

French company Parrot launched its folding Anafi drone, 4K-capable drone, with a starting price of $700, four short months ago. Parrot has now unveiled the updated version in August with improved streaming video quality and new photos features.

Parrot ANAFI W

Today, the company announced yet another firmware upgrade, alongside a new SKU — Anafi Extended, which bundles the drone with accessories and a shoulder bag to potentially woo buyers away from that other drone maker. Extended at an $800 the bundle ships with three batteries, including two months of free access to Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Parrot also includes a two-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud with either package. Parrot announced a partnership with Adobe in September. All this news comes ahead of the holiday season hoping to up the sales.The new features include:

• Enhanced HDR and the enhanced video and photo shooting modes that benefit from improved colour tone and an adaptive dynamic range which can make adjustments in response to ambient lighting conditions. For example in dimly lit scenes like sunsets, it enhances shadow detail, and in brighter lighting it boosts contrast while minimizing noise.
• FollowMe capabilities have been updated with three new tracking modes: Path, Lock and Dynamic. Path will follow users from behind, while Lock tracks a subject at a constant distance with the yaw angle locked to keep the background framed as well. Dynamic will track a subject at a constant distance and angle.
• The five new panorama photo modes in FireFlight 6, Anafi’s companion smartphone app: Sphere, Little Planet, Tunnel, Vertical 180, and Horizontal 180. These are generated from roughly a dozen stitched-together photos that take about five minutes to capture in total.
• Little Planet compresses the scenery into a “floating globe,” and Tunnel mode positions the sky in the centre of the image. Meanwhile, Sphere — a 360-degree panorama — works on VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive and supports Facebook’s 360 Photos
• Also new is the enhanced Dolly Zoom. With the tap of a button, Anafi zooms in and locks focus on trees, landmarks, and other points of interest simultaneously distorting the background.
• Hyperlapse video which can accelerate videos to 15, 30, 60, 120, or 240 times normal speed — as is slow motion at 720p at 120 frames per second. It’s available in the Anafi’s simple touch and fly mode as well as with a planned flight path for custom shots.
• Owners will find a new spiral cineshot too which will centre the camera on a subject as the drone flies in an upward spiral, but it’s fully automatic so users need not be expert pilots to get the shot.

Anafi faces serious competition from DJI’s Mavic 2 Pro and Mavic 2 Zoom also unveiled in August. The segment’s large enough to fit all of them since the total consumer drone market is projected to be worth over $9 billion by 2024.