GoPro drone moan brings more bad Karma GoPro's share price has dropped a further five per cent on the news that its new drone, named Karma, had power problems. Less than a week after the company's shares nosedived following a terrible third quarter revenue report, the sports camera manufacturer was forced to recall its new product after reports that several units …
Is 2,500 units sold in two weeks really that bad? Action cam drones, and even photography drones in general, are pretty niche expensive luxuries for what I would think would be a small target market. It seems they made a device for a niche within a niche.
So you buy one, do a few selfie videos, and few action videos and then what? Its too big and bulky to take on a non-photography holiday and if your not a youtube blogger it would seem to be an expensive purchase for little return.
No it's pretty bad imho - this is a main stream bit of tech in every bestbuy, etc in the states.
They're not selling many because it's terrible as youtube reviews (and crashes) testify.
And though the karma is quite bulky, the DJI Mavic fits in the palm of your hand - one of the reasons I've ordered one and sold myPhantom 3 was that the P3 was the whole of my carry on luggage when I wanted to take it on holiday - the Mavic will pop on the same backpack I carry my laptop in.
So is it niche ? sure - in a way, but SLRs well in the millions, actions cams sell in the millions. The Mavic are back ordered till xmas.
unfortunately for gopro (and I've been using their cameras for 8 years), their drone is just terrible...
I'd not call 799$ tech mainstream. You better had business need (or a way to write if off) before visiting BestBuy. Not even hardcore geeks would part with their hard earned cash without 2nd thought. Not at this pricetag (that buys you 1080 and bragging rights in Crisis benchmarks;).
The Mavic is the problem for Go-Pro, and every other quadcopter maker. It's a game changer and is cleaning up, even though it's more expensive. Some amazing deals on Phantoms because people weren't buying them - they had pre-ordered Mavic and were prepared to wait and pay more.
The Mavic isn't perfect and won't perform as well in windy conditions, but for the needs of the bulk of the market DJI got it right.
> Is 2,500 units sold in two weeks really that bad?
Depends on what your predictions were.
If you were expecting to sell 2,250 then it's great news, just over target, not so far off that you run into inventory / production capacity issues.
If you were expecting 250, and actually sold 2,500, you need to retrain your market research guy and point out to your production manager that he seems to have added an extra zero to your numbers. As long as you haven't run into cash flow issues, you're singing.
If you were expecting 500,000 and sold 2,500, you better think long and hard what your next step is going to be.
> Can you please not put inline Twitter links to your own feed in the article.
Even better, can you ignore what the bearded guy with the checkered shirt drinking a single-origin organic coffee capuccino says, and not put Twitter links at all?
If I wanted to know what someone has to say on Twatter, I'll go and check myself, thank you.
Yet another cutting edge technology product being let down by poor batteries. Maybe they should meet with Mr. Musk and see if he can cook up something more reliable inside that Gigafactory?
The Karma shows where drone technology is headed, but is priced at the premium end of a market that faces rapid price competition and stricter legislation affecting consumers in several regions of the world.
Perhaps there's a business opportunity to hire these drones out to people who want to use them on their travels but don't want to invest so much in owning one?
If the batteries wouldn't just fail but explode, they could rebrand the thing as a fireworks display. I hear Disney is in the market.
*Engage fanboi mode*
Because the GoPro really does offer better bang for buck. The SJ cams are not bad cameras for their price, but just do not offer the same video quality (No really, they don't). The new Hero 5 offers some things like in camera lens distortion correction, wind noise cancellation (up to a point), GOOD shake reduction and some other small but noticable improvements that are just not available on competitors. * /Fanboi mode*
The Hero5 also does away with the external housing for waterproofing. A move I think is silly as it leaves the camera very very vulnerable to scratching, shock and damage.
"Video quality improvements aren't worth £200 when good enough is good enough"
To you, obviously not. To some of use, they are. that's the definition of premium products frankly.
Your argument reduces to 'everything should be build down to the lowest price sh1t'. I'm sure even you have something in your house that you paid more for over the poundland equivalent because the premium features/quality/whatever were important to you.
I've got 6 cheap chinese action cams (as I keep buying them thinking the next one won't be as crap), but they are all terrible compared to my gopros. Are they terrible for everyone ? christ no - 30 quid for decent 1080p - wire in. But if you want high bit rate, good optics to get that extra 30-40% quality then there's a product out that gives you it. If you don't need it, don't buy it.
stu 4
To you, obviously not. To some of use, they are. that's the definition of premium products frankly.
Your argument reduces to 'everything should be build down to the lowest price sh1t'. I'm sure even you have something in your house that you paid more for over the poundland equivalent because the premium features/quality/whatever were important to you.
Not to me, but more importantly to the bulk of market. "some of us" isn't really where the money is.
Same thing happened to Nokia/MS putting really good cameras on their phones. Not enough people cared.
My argument is not "everything should be built down to the lowest....." at all.
My argument is that for the mass market, a good product (not lowest price sh1t) is good enough and does the job well. Which is one of (but obviously not the main one) reason that I don't travel to work in a Bentley.
@wordsmith - fair point. I suppose it's the definition of 'mainstream' here. You are right - both gopro's and premium drones are for the top of the market. Where we started though was is 2500 drones many or not. I think if the thing is 'mainsteam' enough to be for sale in every single best buy, apple store, currys, argos, etc then it probably counts as mainstream. So I think the Karma tanked. blackmagic cameras are your bentley equivalent, not gopros. gopros are maybe the... I dunno...BMWs ?
> You are right - both gopro's and premium drones are for the top of the market.
However, you need to be able to command that premium somehow. Something that for example Apple or Tesla have got down to an art, and it is not solely (or even primarily) based on how good your technology actually is.
That where GoPro have gone badly wrong. I did follow them for a bit and then invested in them for a short while but got out as soon as I came to the conclusion that I had made a mistake (at the time the post-IPO hype was still going strong). From my research, young, occasionally active people (aka weekend heroes) no longer see GoPros as cool as they once were perceived. For better or worse, the majority of those are not willing to pay that premium for whatever extra quality or features they may have, and they don't perceive the brand as a differentiator in itself, so they're all just going for the Chinese clones.
When I initially invested, I was expecting they would do a Red Bull and turn their brand into the product itself. Two/three years back they would have had a fair shot at it, but no longer I don't think.
For my quadcopter filming I would have gone with a GoPro if I had that amount of spare cash floating about for such a toy, but I went with a Xiaomi Yi because from what I saw the video quality was really good and it has scripting capability to tweak things beyond the initial settings, notably increasing the video bitrate beyond its normal selectable settings, and I wasn't disappointed with the 1080p60 quality from it, especially as it only cost me about £55 at the time.
When the opportunity came to buy a couple of Turnigy 2k (rebranded Sjcam SJ4000+ 2k Wifi) cameras cheap I went for it because I have more than one quad and more than one gimbal, but oh dear, the video quality is bad, there's not even a setting to select bitrate just resolution/framerate, and the image appears to be artificially over-sharpened which just makes the compression artefacts look worse. Plus it can't properly do framerates of 60fps or higher, the hardware just can't handle those high framerates so it duplicates frames randomly to pad out the framerate to 60/120/240fps, which kills any possibility of smooth motion shots.
> There are plenty of go pro clones out there now. At a third of the price and of comparable quality. Why would anyone spend 300 quid on a camera they may lose when they can spend 100 for exactly the same thing but without a go pro logo..
That was exactly my thought a few weeks after GoPro's IPO, so I sold my shares fast. Glad I did. :-)
As with PCs, phones and the like, the problem with action cameras is that there isn't really an upgrade cycle any more. If you're a professional, the latest and greatest camera may well have features that make it worth upgrading. But if you're just a hobbyist, there's very little point in buying every shiny new camera that comes out. I have a GoPro; the original HD one from back before they needed numbers and colours and a spreadsheet to figure out which one you had. It does 1080p, or 720p at higher framerate, timelapse photos, it has good picture quality, enough battery to last several hours, and takes SD cards big enough to last a week or more when on holiday. And it's still better than many of the cheap cameras being released now. GoPro aren't having issues because there's anything wrong with their products or because of all the competition, it's simply that for the vast majority of people, once they have a camera they don't need another one.
Agreeing with most of your comment, but with a small correction:
"...once they have a camera they don't need another one, until they have their old camera lost, stolen, smashed or taken by a wild animal."
Have you seen all those videos in Youtube of people finding GoPros in the bottom of a river? In some rivers there seem to be more GoPros than fish! ;-)
SJCAM have another thing that differentiates them from GoPro. The video quality when compared to the high end cameras is always "a bit shit". Not bad, good enough for many but still a bit shit. I for one have been looking at them and every time thought "nah, the video quality just doesn't work for me".
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