Spent many a hour playing with my S6 and taking it apart , modding and fixing it.
Prob spent more time on this than any other quad to be honest.
Even with all the issues these have , I still enjoy this one.
I have no idea whether Wingsland is still making these or a 3rd party in china knocking them out or its just old stock left that is being sold online.
Bangood sold all they had and then just before Christmas last year they got another 50 back in stock.
One does wonder where they are all getting them from and Aliexpress seems to have loads of stock, but cheaper to buy from Banggood normally as now and then they do offers on them.
But there must now surely be many thousands of these out there, and surely that proves there is a market for this size of quadcopter at the price level they are now set.
Now to make it worthwhile , one really needs to buy the R6 controller and have at least 3 batteries.
So yes this does push up the price a fair bit.
But as many said and I get a lot of emails about this , is it worth buying??
As always I say this, if you buy one of these and can accept these points:-
Flight time and I mean by flight time the actual time from take off to landing at 0% will be between 5-6 mins normally. Sometimes a tad higher and sometimes a lot lower if weather is cold. Many claim much higher flight times, but normally they going by the recording time and thats always lower, as most hit record and wait for sat lock etc before lifting off.
No real stabilization, it has a few modes where it can be turned on but its not worth using to be honest. Better to either flim on a dead calm no wind day or for slight shaking do some post edting for sorting out the jello etc.
The bottom sonar and optical postion hold DO NOT WORK, they have been disabled on all versions.
Because of the above point , you can not fly indoors! Also because of no sonar this jumps about 8-10 feet at take off and will hit any low ceiling! I know this as I tried this on my first S6 and it hit the ceiling and then veered off into the wall and broke it’s props.
If you have access to a very big room with high ceilings you might be okay, especially if your craft does not get any kind of gps coverage, as someone told me that they were told by Wingsland if you block off craft from getting gps, it will work better indoors. Even indoors mine gets a few gps sats, so that is prob why mine went shooting to stars indoors. My advice be safe and test outdoors first. ( also some other advice , when testing out in say back yard tether the craft with a bit of string, so if it does go out of control it wont be heading back to china. Trust me this has saved me more than once! I think it may be due to interference from other wifi. This uses both 2.4GHZ band for the craft control and the 5GHZ band for the video.
The app and firmware are no longer supported by Wingsland , there has been no firmware updates since November 2017. I have read that in fact Wingsland have abandoned this quad, so no real support unless you live in the USA, where they still have offices.
For the rest of us, we are on our own.
The batteries are non smart ones, inside the battery is just 2 LiHv cells.
This in my view makes these batteries too expensive for what they are.
But a plus of that is because of no smart pcb inside , you can replace the cells if you know what you are doing!!! This will come into play once there are no batteries avaible to buy anymore.
The craft range using a phone is very small, especially if like me you live in Europe.
The rules here are for much lower wifi power than the rest of the world 🙁
Good points:-
Looks very cool, the packaging (especially the ones that come with the plastic carry case ) is the best I have seen. Wingsland got the presentation spot on with this. Although this was probably originally done as it was a premium product at launch. The price reflected this at the time.
Has a really great camera, on a dead calm no wind day these take really first class photos and video.
It folds up to a really small carry size, and makes taking places a lot easier.
Has great hardware and build quality (bearing in mind bottom sensors disabled and dont work)
Using gps and glonass , it gets a fast lock and in no wind holds postion really well, and holds altitude well in NO WIND (any kind of breeze and it will vary a lot up and down)
So if there are any other points that spring to mind will edit this……
So to recap, for what I wanted this for it fits the bill at current prices.
For sure do not expect this to be rock solid like a DJI spark. Its no where near as good.
BUT…. This now costs a 3rd of a price of a dji spark.
This is not really a beginners quadcopter, because it needs a lot of pateince and tweaking to get most from it.
If Wingsland had fixed the bottom sensors and updated the app and also provide some kind of extended battery to buy, they would in my view had a winner in this class.
Its such a shame they gave up on it, with a few updates on firmware and app this would have been pretty special.
My own goal was to get this to a true 10mins flight time and it would be perfect for what I wanted it for.
With different props and the different battery I modded in, I am pretty sure I have this now, just waiting for some calm warmer weather to test.
There are other quads in this price range thesedays, like for example the Simtoo xt175 fairy drone. Even that has a working postion flow and around same price with a controller as the S6 on its own, and also from reviws I have seen has a poor range and incomplete software too.
But….. Its not made anywhere as good build quality, and its camera is not that good.
And of course a Zerotech dobby is around same size, flys longer on a smaller battery and has working optical flow and sonar and working eis, but that craft is double or more than a S6 and Zerotech dont make a dedicated controllker for it.
There are rumours DJI will bring out a smaller version of the Spark this year that folds up and that may be another option in the future, but for sure will be expensive I guess.
I expect more small size quadcopter this year and so the S6 might soon be buried , but there are a lot out there who bought these and especially at the now dicount prices, so expect it to be around for a while yet.
Happy safe flying all.