It was late last year that Sony let slip that it would be launching Airpeak, its own drone, on the market. We guess all that practise with making fans for games consoles somehow naturally translated to tech that actually takes off (instead of just sounds like it’s about to).
At this year’s CES, the Japanese tech-maker revealed a little more of its drone ambitions. Specifically, the drone itself, in a video presentation that shows off some of its skills in action. Not much is known about the drone on a purely technical level — we don’t know what sort of flight times we’re looking at or anything like that, but Sony claims that it’s the smallest drone that will take one of its Alpha cameras. And, based on what we can see, it looks fairly advanced.
Climbing to the Airpeak
Sony used the Airpeak to shoot footage of another in-development product — the video above shows the road test of the company’s Vision-S vehicle, as seen by its Airpeak drone. The drone itself isn’t tiny — it’s not as backpack friendly as a DJI might be — but it seems capable of a decent payload and the drone’s struts cleverly get out of your damn way when in flight, so you don’t run your footage with unsightly intruders in the corner.
Video is captured using one of the company’s always-excellent α7S III cameras — which is why it looks as good as it does. But even a camera as smart as that one will battle when buckled to a shoddy aircraft. We get a glimpse of a very fancy flight controller partway in. It looks advanced enough that we’re questioning just how ‘consumer’ the drone will be, but it certainly seems able to handle Northern Hemisphere weather conditions without issue. It should do fine here in SA (until you take it to the beach, probably).
There’s no firm availability timeline but, when Sony first revealed the project, a 2021 launch was expected. It could be we’ll see it later this year.
Source: The Verge
Header image: Sony/YouTube [screenshot]
