Potensic D88

1.1 Snazzy

I haven't seen a huge amount about these drones so thought I'd jot down a few words here as I work to figure this thing out, enjoy it for what it is and try and work past its shortcomings.

I come with a background in engineering and have had some RC planes and cars in the past. I am in no way a drone specialist with the only other drone in my hangar being a DJI Telo.

 Review.

2.1 unfolded and ready to go

First impressions

The drone comes packaged as pictured if fig 1.1 in a nice padded case with a controller, 2 batteries, charger, some spare blades and a manual. For the relatively low cost it seems pretty snazzy.

Setup involved taking off some clear film covers and a fairly straight forward process of pairing to the controller. From there there is a pre flight giro alignment then away you go. All of this is explained in the manual which I highly recommend reading as it isn't immediately obvious what you need to do.

It fly's very well, quickly stabilising and is very responsive to the controls. When the gps is armed it is noticeably even better, drifting back to where it should be after a gust of wind for example. Going from a blue tooth mini drone to this, the range on the controller seems really good for WiFi. Once it gets going it is pretty quick but doesn't feel intimidating or hard to control.  
Battery life is another big plus, as the drone happily flies around for up to half an hour on a single charge and the kit comes with a second battery. Not bad at all.

2.2 Steady indoor flying let down by the camera

The camera

Whilst the D88 is not small, I have managed to fly it indoors too, a testimony to it's good stability where it outperforms my little DJI Telo which was more likely to wonder off. As you can see in the quickly edited fig 2.2, the drone happily sat just off the mirror to take its own selfy, the very wide angle lens required this to be taken pretty close and still needed some cropping. The 4k camera however is the first thing I am going to find issue with here.

There are two main ways that media is handled by the drone: It is either captured and stored on the onboard micro SD card or it is shared direct to the connected phone. From there, there are two ways to capture an image: either via the buttons on the controller (short press for a photograph, long press for video) or via the button on the app. 

2.3 Unedited screenshot from video

When using the phone, you are able to choose the image quality which didn't seem to make much difference in the few times I got to play with it and some basic light and saturation settings. The quality of the images and video shared to the phone via the app are noticeably lower quality than those stored on the SD card (a screenshot of which can be seen in fig 2.3) which itself isn't that great either. The D88 is heavily touted as a 4k drone. It is not. I don't even think it quite makes1080p video and the stills don't stand up to much scrutiny either. as can be seen in fig 2.2, anything but bright sunlight quickly makes things very grainy which necessitated this image to go through a despeckaling process followed by a resharpen to even get that quality of image. It has the distinct feel of a cheap Chinese action camera from the the 2010's no doubt leaning far too hard on upscaling to make up for an under performing sensor stuck behind low grade optics.

The wide angle lens does give a good field of view, quickly capturing a huge area without the need to fly super high.  For any change of frame, other than vertically, you will need to manoeuvre the drone and that's where its next problem is; stability. The camera is spring mounted but this just adds to the jerkiness of flight with the camera bouncing about for any excuse. You really need a soft touch if you want to record anything usable with it. The camera does have a vertical adjustment, allowing for a 90 degree angle change from fully forward to straight down. This is controlled either by the controller wheel or through the phone which brings us nicely onto the other big gripe I have with this drone.

Android phone connectivity

The 'M RC pro app' that you are instructed to use with this drone won't connect to Android 12 phones so won't work on my Pixel 6. This is a huge setback forcing me to use the drone more like an RC plane.
Luckily I do have an old Nokia Pureview 9. This did work with this app for a couple of goes before also stopping working so I did at least get to give it a go. 

The mobile phone connection to the drone is separate to the controller and as such has a much shorter range. I could fly about 40-50 metres, line of sight in a field, before the phone disconnected. I still had control via the controller which was still showing a good connection but I was  now back to being an RC pilot with a sudden need to figure out what way my drone was now pointing.
By default, there is a 10 metre range limiter in place on the app. As I had previously been flying without the app I had been enjoying limitless flying so this did confuse me when my drone suddenly didn't want to go very far before grinding to a halt. This was particularly distressing when I took off before the GPS was connected so I was able to get 20 metres away before the drone again stopped but would now not come fully back either! Thankfully landing and taking back off again reset the circle and I was able to stepping stone my way back before figuring out why the drone was acting this way and turning the feature off.

Conclusion

This is a budget drone but not exactly cheap at a bit shy of £300 (bargains can be found however). The app compatibility is pretty poor with Android 12 being over 6 months old now and even then, it was prone to crashing on the older Android version with it finally not working at all after a couple of days. I will go into more detail, working round the app later. The camera quality is another big letdown. I think with some practice, this drone could be used for some short aerial shots in perfect conditions but it really isn't a cinematography tool and the stills are probably only useful for observation  or a bit of fun.
Those two negatives aside, the drone is otherwise pretty okay. the stability in flight really does impress me and it can really zip along if you wanted to mess about with obstacles or maybe have a low budget race with your mates.
I don't think I would have bought this drone if I had known it was as inferior to it's higher end competitors as it was. I would rather just spend the extra money and get something that actually works which is a shame as even just getting the app right would make this at least fun.

What now?

I won't make multiple pages for this thing as I doubt I will hold onto it for long enough. I will however post at the bottom of this review anything interesting I find and share it with you here.

Looking a bit harder at the app

To be clear on what doesn't work with the app on the Android 12 Google Pixel 6: The device will connect to the D88's WIFI and the app will load up allowing you to access the control screen but that is as far as you get. The red banner remains, telling you that there is no connection to the drone. Turning off cellular, moving away from other WIFI sources, rebooting and reinstalling the app made no difference. Some apps (there are more) do say they are not supported on later android version and I think that is the case for this one too. A fact not advertised on the sales material. Naughty Potensic.

In an attempt to get some connection working I have tried a number of different apps that all appear to be variation of M RC pro, some even from the same designer. One in particular that was recommended on a review was Ophelia Go. Another was Bugs Go with the listed B4w drone looking suspiciously like a slight variation on the D88. None of these, or several others, worked on the Android 12 device.
On the older Nokia Pureview 9, I had more succcess with M RC go and Ophelia Go both working at least once. I found if one didn't work, I could swap to the other and that might. A few weeks in however and neither will get past the splash screen without crashing despite reinstalling. I have since found out that resetting the WiFi can get M RC Pro to work sometimes.
I tried a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet but a lack of free apps on the microsoft store stopped that attempt. I will see if I can find something online as I am sure someone has come up with a wacky idea.
I have also considered seeing if a simple camera sharing app might do the job as that is all I really need. Not being able to change setting or use the recall or other program modes is a shame but I can live without.
That aside, I am stuck waiting for an update to the app to come out so have downloaded a huge collection of apps to see if one gets updated.

A few more apps that show promis include: W FPV, HS GPS V1 and SJ GPS Pro.

Getting more out of the camera

I had a suspicion thatthe camera might perform better in ideal conditions. A few years ago, I had an SJ cam action camera (poor mans gopro) that boasted 1080p and looked the part but rarely got anything you would actually want to rewatch. However on a bright sunny day, with the sun behind you it actually did reasonably well so I took the camera out to see where it would perform best.

3.1 yours truly post processed

First off, none of the images are very good straight out of the camera which I would not expect. My Nikon D3x doesn't spit out exactly what I want and I expect to have to do some editing. 

With a pretty low resolution, you don't get much to play with however. Images are usually soft with lots of artefacts form poor JPEG compression. Editing this out is possible like in fig 3.1, a fairly quick job here was finding a balance between sharpening for background detail without making it overly harsh on skin tones or the clouds. This sounds like a post processing issue but you can only work with what your camera gives you and this isn't very easy.

3.2 Combine harvester post processed

The combine harvester in fig 3.2 was poorly framed but I wanted to give another close up example. This image needed a bit of a crop (sadly I can't crop in the wheels) but being a non organic subject I could get away with more sharpening and contrast. I wasn't wild about the close up performance but then maybe that isn't where the drone is supposed to be strong, lets climb.

3.3 Walcott indirectly into the sun postprocessed

Getting up high like in fig 3.3 and 3.4 seem to be a bit nicer. Although you will not be rewarded for zooming in and exploring, you will find a reasonably pleasing image can be achieved with a relatively modest 100 metres of altitude. Again, much like in any photography, getting the sun behind you is a must although I was surprised that the camera had the dynamic range to make 3.3 work with a little image post processing. 

Another good trick I found was to centre the horizon so you don't get as much barrel distortion from the fish eye lens. I cropped both of these images whilst lens correcting as the drone was a bit on the piss fighting a cross wind.

3.4 Walcott Fen, Sun behind post processed