Phantom 4 Pro Plus Problems (lots of P’s but even more Probs)

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out my Phantom 4 Review here on the blog! 🙂 Enjoy 🙂 I’ll put the video from the review at the bottom of this post.

So I have both versions of the Phantom 4 Pro. The “Plus” version that includes an integrated screen and the normal one where you just use your phone (iPhone or Android). I went out this weekend with my friend Mark who also has the Plus version, and we noted the EXACT SAME ISSUES. Some are major… others are minor… I’ll list them in the order of the most annoying!

1) At least three times while up in the air and fairly far away, the Plus thought there were obstacles in front of it. There was nothing… it was in the middle of the bright open air. This mostly happened when I was trying to fly it back to me. The two workarounds I found were a) to do a 180 and back it home to trick the sensors and b) switch to ATTI mode to manually fly it back. Of course, ATTI (Manual) mode can be very scary if the quad is a far away dot and you can’t tell what direction you’re going. (It seemed to happen whether or not I calibrated the compass before each flight.)

2) On four occasions the UI disappeared and we were left with a slightly zoomed-in version.

3) On three occasions I would get it up and somewhere between 50 and 100 feet it would say “Maximum Altitude Reached.”

4) After booting up, it took a long time to get a good connection to the controller. The connection was often weak even though there was no EM interference anywhere (we were in the middle of nowhere on the South Island of New Zealand).

5) Every time I fly now after a few minutes it says “Unable to save video – video cache is full.” For a while, this messed with my head because it made me think my SD card was full. That’s what it sounds like, right? So I kept landing and putting in new SD cards. But now I think it means the controllers video cache was full. I don’t know what that means or why it happens. The cache should just be dumping all the time as new stuff comes in, right?

6) The video that appears on the screen is not super-smooth and does a major tear randomly every 5-15 seconds. By “tear” I mean it shows half a second of video from 2-3 seconds previously. It freaks me out because I don’t feel like I’m getting real time video – also it makes me think I’m not getting smooth video.

7) When broadcasting to Facebook Live (See My Facebook Live Videos!), there was no way to upload the HD version or save the video myself. These are both options avail on the non plus version.

8) When going live on Facebook, I cannot choose my “Fan Page” – only my personal page.

9) Last, a minor one… when making the description for FB Live, I only have like 80 characters and there is no way to copy/paste more than a single word.

10) …another minor one… didn’t notice it until the import but the default clock does not update automatically. All my pictures say they were taken in 1951, which is well-known for being one of the worst years for quadcopters.

Anyway, I didn’t have any of those problems with the non-Plus version. The best thing about the Plus version is still the Very Bright Screen (way brighter than a mobile phone) and how quickly I can get it up in the air from the box. I can probably launch it in 45-60 seconds after I open the box and break it down back into the box in 30 seconds.

However, with all the bugs listed above, I’ll still recommend the non-plus version for a while.

Here’s the video from my first review of the Phantom 4! 🙂