[somehnguy]

>Major benefit of analog video is a progressive degradation of quality as a signal gets weaker and almost instant reacquisition after a complete dropout. I'm curious to see how DJI competes with that on a digital video.

The good news is that you can find that out right now. DJI HD FPV has been available for over a year, this is just their first drone offering in the category.

The short answer is that it degrades very gracefully. They have what they call 'focus mode', where the edges of the video lose quality before the middle (where the data matters the most). Once you've used up that signal degradation threshold the rest of the frame slowly degrades to a lower bitrate, and then after that latency starts rising.

After flying analog for 5 years it only took me about 1 day to strongly prefer the DJI FPV video solution. The range is far better, and the video is mind-blowingly clear when compared to analog. On anything but my racing specific drones I have been installing the DJI HD FPV system instead of normal analog gear.

[ofrancon]

> it degrades very gracefully

Pretty convincing comparison by Joshua Bardwell:

Shark Byte: https://youtu.be/9iKc2v05blw?t=926

vs DJI: https://youtu.be/9iKc2v05blw?t=1046

vs analog: https://youtu.be/9iKc2v05blw?t=1227

[cma]

> They have what they call 'focus mode', where the edges of the video lose quality before the middle (where the data matters the most).

If the latency is low enough it would be nice if they could incorporate eye tracking into that in the future, and move around the high quality region with your eyes. And maybe feed it from a gimballess 360 camera so you have full freedom to look around. Stereo cameras would also be nice, maybe with some differential compression between eyes to keep bandwidth down (would need a gimbal for that most likely, to keep line between cameras horizontal).