Review: Parrot Anafi

The drone manufacturer DJI has dominated the skies for years now. The race currently isn't even close, with the Drone King capturing around three quarters of the consumer market. But DJI isn't alone out there. The French company Parrot has been quietly making flying machines for roughly as long as the Chinese giant. True, most of Parrot's efforts have been glorified toys. But with the introduction of the Anafi, Parrot's first folding, 4K-shooting drone, it looked like the company was finally ready to compete head-to-head with DJI. Unfortunately, it isn't.

First, the good news. The Parrot Anafi has some features that you can't find on virtually any other consumer drones. The camera gimbal can tilt up and down a full 180 degrees, meaning not only can it shoot straight down, but also straight up, enabling it to capture some unique angles. Shoot a slackliner from underneath? That's cool. Somehow, the Anafi manages to keep the rotors out of the shot, a feat most DJI drones fail to do while simply flying forward with the camera pointed straight ahead.

The Anafi's camera is also equipped with a "lossless" zoom lens, which is extremely rare in consumer drones. You can zoom 1.4x when shooting 4K, and 2.4x when in 1080p mode. The drone has the usual suite of automatic camera shots (dronie, orbit, reveal, parabola, and so on), but the zoom capability allows it to pull off one really neat shot: The Dolly Zoom. The famous camera trick employed so effectively by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo. It's that shot where the subject stays the same size in the frame, but the background seems to come closer or get further away. The recently announced DJI Mavic 2 Zoom (which I haven't tested) can also do this. But that's the only drone other than the Anafi with the feature. And the Dolly Zoom trick is hands-down my favorite thing about this drone ... which is a problem.

The other unique feature the Anafi has is 4K HDR video, and here's where things start going wrong. The HDR footage looks pretty terrible. It has tons of noise in the shadows, highlights are still blown out, and the greens and yellows show up grossly oversaturated. The HDR capability is something Parrot is touting to set it apart, but I would say that the HDR footage is more or less unusable. It has moments where it's not objectively awful, but that needs to be the rule, not the exception.

Standard 4K footage looks pretty good when you're all zoomed out. Especially when flying during the golden hour, the Anafi manages to produce some very cinematic-looking footage. But things devolve when you start to look closer. The noise in the image is only more obvious when you use the drone's built-in zoom. The zoom degrades the image quality so badly that you're better off just not using it, aside from the awesome Dolly Zoom.

Flying the Anafi isn't much fun either. Out of the box, its response to the controls is extravagantly sluggish. You can go into the settings and tweak the speed at which it rotates and rises, which does indeed help a lot, but when compared to its closest competitor, the DJI Mavic Air, the Anafi feels lacking in responsiveness. There's also a significant amount of drift. While I sent it up into the air and let it hover in place for a moment, I looked up and saw that it was creeping closer and closer to a tree branch.

The next big hole is that the Anafi has no obstacle avoidance sensors. The Mavic Air's on-board sensors can keep the drone from crashing into things when flying forwards and backwards. DJI's newer Mavic 2 drone has omnidirectional sensors. It all really works. The Anafi doesn't have those avoidance capabilities, which makes all of Parrot's pre-programmed flight routines way more dangerous to use. When taking a "dronie" in a forest clearing, for example, the Anafi started pulling back and up, but I could see that it wasn't rising fast enough to clear some treetops in the distance. A drone with obstacle-avoidance tech would have stopped itself. With the Anafi, I had to manually abort the move to keep it from impaling itself.

This is even more dangerous if you're having the drone track you (or someone else) while you're moving. And speaking of tracking mode, you have to pay extra to unlock that feature via an in-app purchase. Yes, a $700 drone has basic features you need to pay to enable. Parrot sometimes puts the in-app purchases on sale for as little as a dollar, but when you consider all the ways this drone is lacking, forcing the user to fork over any extra coin to unlock key features seems exceedingly short-sighted.

Let's talk about the body. When you first pick it up you might think it's kind of flimsy, but there's a lot of carbon fiber in there. It's not really flimsy, just very light. The Anafi weighs 11.3 ounces—lighter than the Mavic Air's 15. The propellers fold up, making it very compact, and it's simple to unfold. Unfortunately, it's noticeably longer than comparable folding drones when the propeller arms are stowed. If the Mavic Air would fit in most jacket pockets (and it does), the Anafi would be awkwardly sticking way out. This makes it feel less portable, despite the lightness.

The remote control is, unfortunately, too chunky. As with the controller for the Mavic Air, the Anafi controller uses your phone as its screen, but it's a whole lot bigger and fatter, and it doesn't do as good of a job at holding your phone. My phone fell out a couple of times during setup. Just bad design here.

There are a handful of other positives about the Anafi. Flight time is an impressive 25 minutes, the drone can reach speeds of up to 33 miles per hour, and it's actually a bit quieter than competitors (though it still sounds like a swarm of angry wasps). It also takes 21-megapixel RAW DNG files, which is great for those who like to take aerial still photos.

There are just too many things to ding it on, though. Half of the files from my testing came back slightly corrupted in the first two seconds, which led Adobe Premiere to think they were audio files (weird, since there's no sound). I had to go into each file in another video player and manually trim the first two seconds off each of those videos, and then reimport the files. A massive pain.

While Parrot's price is $100 less than the DJI does for the Mavic Air, you're losing way more than $100 worth of value. It's easily Parrot's best drone yet, but it still feels miles behind DJI, and this foray doesn't make it seem like it's ever likely to catch up.