Article from the Mundo Drone archive, published 9 March 2020 and updated 13 May 2020. Text merged on 28 October 2026 from all its 2020 versions; specifications, availability and regulations may have changed since.
The excitement that Skydio 2 has aroused since even before it officially came out was enormous. the brand promised certain qualities that, if true, would put in check even the almighty DJI Mavic 2 .
Analysis and characteristics of Skydio 2
How many people would buy flying cameras, also known as drones, if they didn't have to fear every branch in every tree in the world? How much more could you do with a drone that doesn't hit obstacles?
These are not just rhetorical questions: Skydio 2 is that drone. Where an incorrect move will send most drones to their destination, Skydio's automatic flight system uses AI to duck under the awnings and slide around the branches gently by itself. You have to see the results to believe: people who have never flown a drone in their lives can fly this drone. My three-year-old son flew this drone. Better yet, you can fly alone, automatically filming your walks, bike rides or the types of stunts you would normally catch with a GoPro, but from the sky.
Does that mean you should buy a Skydio 2? That's a more complicated question because somehow this flying robot camera isn't very smart at all. It will be reduced to how much you can trust this drone, and how much it is willing and can allow a computer to take control.
If you're reading these words, it's quite possible that you might be considering Skydio as your first drone, and you should, so I'm going to explain to you things that I wouldn't normally explain in a drone review. That is, intelligent and automatic flight drones always come down to trust. You must rely on a complex machine to stay in the air, respond fast enough to prevent it from crashing into things and automatically return home if you lose the signal from your controller. It was a big problem when the best drone brands like DJI dominated those things for the first time, but we can usually take them for granted now: the latest DJI drones even have sensors to avoid obstacles that also prevent them from crashing into large objects, even if you're not as close as Skydio. But trust isn't just about if you're gonna crash. Depending on where you live, society has laws and stigma against drones flying over private people or properties, and it is generally not supposed to fly an drone unless it can be seen at all times. You should know from the very first moment that when we say Skydio 2 is a drone flying alone without crashing, I'm not talking about flying in the dark, fog, walking down the sidewalk through a crowd of people, or down a busy street. We still can't trust any drones to do those things, and Skydio handles some of them worse than other drones. But in the light of day, when the weather is good, away from other people, you can be confident that the Skydio will still not crash at all. Implicitly we trust that you open your new self-adjustable propellers, take me out of your hand and automatically film me walking or walking through a dense park with foliage. Honestly, I don't even look back to see how it's working anymore, I just hear the humming of the propellers to know it's still there.
In an open area with few obstacles, I trust Skydio 2 to allow me to ride a bike on a trail at full speed, chasing me all the time.
If you add the optional Skydio Beacon, you can also trust that this drone will come looking for you even if you leave it behind, avoiding obstacles along the way.
With the optional Skydio controller, I am confident that I can easily point Skydio's HDR 4K60 camera anywhere in the sky, as a normal drone, but without the same fear.
It is surprising that a drone can do any of these things, much less for almost 20 minutes with a load of average. But you must know that it doesn't all at the same time, or even as well, and I think that's because of Skydio's dizzying array of control schemes.
You can fly the Skydio:
With a phone, at very short distances, whether it follows you automatically or with joysticks or a bit slow virtual touch With the optional Skydio Beacon, it follows you to a greater distance With the optional Skydio Beacon wand mode, where you point it in the direction you would like to fly with a movement of your hand With the optional Skydio Beacon steering mode, where you press the buttons on the beacon to push it to the left, right, up, down and forward With the optional Skydio Beacon paired to your phone via Wi-Fi, simply to allow virtual joysticks and video preview to work at a greater distance With the optional Skydio controller physically connected to your phone to provide you with real joysticks and physical buttons
You may have noticed that I have now written the word "optional" seven times. This is because, although the Skydio 2 comes with a single battery, charger, USB-C cable, a couple of spare propellers and a custom quality rigid housing, it does not come with a controller in the box. But neither can you say which of Skydio's control schemes you should choose because they are all frustrating in one way or another.
With the phone and visual monitoring alone, the Skydio finds it hard to follow you on a high-speed bike ride, through the openings in the thickness, or if you walk or cycle behind the obstacles for more than a couple of seconds. With its poor Wi-Fi reach, it makes no sense to use virtual joysticks to fly even through a stream to see something on the other side: the image would be cut, cut and the drone would be forced to return.
With the optional Skydio Beacon controller, things are getting better. The problems of scope diminish immediately. But strangely, on some occasions and tests, the GPS beacon does not prevent you from leaving behind the Skydio to start or keep your camera fixed on the subject ... And it's always a pain to light the beacon. It takes forever to get a proper GPS lock and synchronize it with the drone.
Skydio Controller feels like a toy. Compared to the incredible construction quality of the Skydio 2 itself, whose elegant construction of black and blue magnesium alloy does not resemble any other drone, the bulky plastic controller optional screams "I was a last minute idea" with every fiber of its being.
Skydio is not trying to hide that it is a modified Parrot Anafi controller, but it feels like a bad choice for these reasons:
It does not always connect to our phones, sometimes it forces us to flip the USB cable and/or restart the application. It is not securely attached to phones with a cover While Skydio cites a range of 3.5 km, the connection sometimes does not offer the robustness of DJI's OcuSync for example Some controller buttons do nothing, while others do not work as expected (can land, but not take off) On the positive side, it is a real physical controller that really works if you are patient. A priori the best combination would be beacon + phone to get the most flexibility.
But the other key thing you need to know about Skydio 2 controls is that it never has total control.
If Skydio 2 thinks he can't get through a breach, he won't, even if he could blow a normal drone through it without any trouble. If you see a couple of elements you need to dodge on the sidewalk, you could fly to the center of the street, even if you told him to stay on the opposite side of you.
And you want to be very careful when landing the Skydio, because it disables obstacle evasion when you manually ask the drone to land... which can lead to an accident very easily. Skydio claims it's an intentional design decision, but it doesn't make much sense: this drone seems perfectly capable of finding its own safe landing zone autonomously when it runs out of battery, so why waste that during a manual landing?
Here's the point in the review that you might be wondering: If you don't fly drones to earn a living, does this make any sense to professionals? What is the quality of the image?
The answer is that Skydio 2 is not for professionals. It doesn't mean the image quality is bad; it's more like this drone operates more like a flying robot than a flying camera.
One of those keys is that Skydio 2 only films in one color mode. There is nothing like a flat, cinema-like mode to open up more flexibility to manipulate colors and exposure in subsequent processing. That's gonna be okay for the average user, but if you want to do professional jobs, it won't do you any good.
That said, the footage you get from that standard color profile is solid: the colors highlight, the white balance is well calibrated, the dynamic range is decent and is as sharp as needed, as long as you continue shooting at a very low level of ISO. Once you start to increase the ISO, there will naturally be more noise, and you will also notice how the footage begins to lose that contrast and color. Still, you may like some other options, such as 120 fps to 1080p slow motion and HDR recording that actually looks good despite the supersaturated red and green ones.
When it comes to photos, Skydio takes photos of 12MP both in RAW and JPG, and photos that have an acceptable quality: minimal chromatic aberration and good details in general. But still, the photo mode feels a little unfinished and disappointing. For example, you can't take photos with much manual control, and there are no fun photo modes like 360 spherical photos, 180 panoramic or vertical shots. Sure, you can do it manually, but you could expect more from this drone in that sense. Let's hope that's something Skydio will address in a software update instead of waiting for a new product.
Another option: how this drone flies. There's no way to deactivate obstacle evasion, which means you could start making decisions that you don't always agree with. Will it go under an obstacle, up or around? Or will it stop completely? There's no way to know, and that unpredictability could be frustrating. But it's definitely less frustrating than crashing your drone.
Finally, video transmission connectivity seems to be worse than other drones. Even when connectivity was strong, video transmission can have about a half-second lag between the camera and the transmitter. That's not uncommon with drones that depend on Wi-Fi, but you would expect more than one dedicated controller.
The Skydio 2 is not for professionals nor for absolute beginners. Yeah, he's capable of shooting some amazing things autonomously, but he wouldn't know if he can be blindly trusted when it comes to recording extreme sports for example.
Honestly, it looks like an unfinished product. It is true that DJI has released some of its models initially with cut-off features and software that has subsequently been correcting many of the problems that have been detected in its launch. We hope this is Skydio's case.
How many people would buy flying cameras, also known as drones, if they didn't have to fear every branch in every tree in the world? How much more could you do with a drone that doesn't hit obstacles?
These are not just rhetorical questions: Skydio 2 is that drone. Where an incorrect move will send most drones to their destination, Skydio's automatic flight system uses AI to duck under the awnings and slide around the branches gently by itself. You have to see the results to believe: people who have never flown a drone in their lives can fly this drone. My three-year-old son flew this drone. Better yet, you can fly alone, automatically filming your walks, bike rides or the types of stunts you would normally catch with a GoPro, but from the sky.
Does that mean you should buy a Skydio 2? That's a more complicated question because somehow this flying robot camera isn't very smart at all. It will be reduced to how much you can trust this drone, and how much it is willing and can allow a computer to take control.
If you're reading these words, it's quite possible that you might be considering Skydio as your first drone, and you should, so I'm going to explain to you things that I wouldn't normally explain in a drone review. That is, intelligent and automatic flight drones always come down to trust. You must rely on a complex machine to stay in the air, respond fast enough to prevent it from crashing into things and automatically return home if you lose the signal from your controller. It was a big problem when the best drone brands like DJI dominated those things for the first time, but we can usually take them for granted now: the latest DJI drones even have sensors to avoid obstacles that also prevent them from crashing into large objects, even if you're not as close as Skydio. But trust isn't just about if you're gonna crash. Depending on where you live, society has laws and stigma against drones flying over private people or properties, and it is generally not supposed to fly an drone unless it can be seen at all times. You should know from the very first moment that when we say Skydio 2 is a drone flying alone without crashing, I'm not talking about flying in the dark, fog, walking down the sidewalk through a crowd of people, or down a busy street. We still can't trust any drones to do those things, and Skydio handles some of them worse than other drones. But in the light of day, when the weather is good, away from other people, you can be confident that the Skydio will still not crash at all. Implicitly we trust that you open your new self-adjustable propellers, take me out of your hand and automatically film me walking or walking through a dense park with foliage. Honestly, I don't even look back to see how it's working anymore, I just hear the humming of the propellers to know it's still there.
In an open area with few obstacles, I trust Skydio 2 to allow me to ride a bike on a trail at full speed, chasing me all the time.
If you add the optional Skydio Beacon, you can also trust that this drone will come looking for you even if you leave it behind, avoiding obstacles along the way.
With the optional Skydio controller, I am confident that I can easily point Skydio's HDR 4K60 camera anywhere in the sky, as a normal drone, but without the same fear.
It is surprising that a drone can do any of these things, much less for almost 20 minutes with a load of average. But you must know that it doesn't all at the same time, or even as well, and I think that's because of Skydio's dizzying array of control schemes.
You can fly the Skydio:
With a phone, at very short distances, whether it follows you automatically or with joysticks or a bit slow virtual touch With the optional Skydio Beacon, it follows you to a greater distance With the optional Skydio Beacon wand mode, where you point it in the direction you would like to fly with a movement of your hand With the optional Skydio Beacon steering mode, where you press the buttons on the beacon to push it to the left, right, up, down and forward With the optional Skydio Beacon paired to your phone via Wi-Fi, simply to allow virtual joysticks and video preview to work at a greater distance With the optional Skydio controller physically connected to your phone to provide you with real joysticks and physical buttons Specifications
Technical Specifications Sony CMOS Sensor IMX577 1 / 2.3? 12,3 Megapixels. Video 4K up to 60 fps in HDR, up to 120 fps in slow motion in HD resolutions. Pictures of 12 Megapixels (4056 x 3040 jpg or DNG raw) in HDR, including range mode. 20 mm lens (equivalent in 35 mm format) f/2.8. Record MPEG-4 h.264 / h.265 @ 100Mbps on micro SD cards (minimum class V30). 3840×2160 30 fps / 3840×2160 60 fps / 3840×2160 48 fps / 3840×2160 24 fps / 1920×1080 120 fps / 1920×1080 60 fps / 1920×1080 30 fps. 3-axis Gimbal with inclination ± 124 °, twist ± 120 ° and panning ± 12.5 °. Maximum speed: 36 mph (57.93 km/h), flight time: 23 minutes per battery. Dimensions: 223 x 273 x 74 mm (length x width x height). Skydio 2 Manual English
Pros and cons of this Drone
- Practically shock-proof
- Follow-up AI algorithms are your main dish
- Very competitive image quality in its class
- None of Skydio's three controllers are exactly great.
- He's not smart enough to stay completely out of danger.
- You can still crash it by landing badly. This doesn't make sense.
Conclusions
This is a promising drone, which we sincerely believe was launched into the market earlier. It needs a thorough software review and the fact that it includes almost nothing in the box and we have to buy quite a few accessories separately they do not make it so competitive. Its main dish are the tracking algorithms that make it more capable than the competition drones, but in the other factors such as image quality, autonomy, etc. They're left behind.