Customer Ratings & Reviews

This will be the third drone I have owned. The first was an expensive larger drone in 2018, which is still in service today. The second was a smaller toy like drone and this is my first less than 250 g drone. The unit has several professional features, including a three axis gimbal And an updated app which has several nice features and tutorials for beginners. The drone is compact and comes with a nice carrying case and a single battery. The written instructions are OK but are somewhat limited. The remote control unit requires an android or iPhone and has nice cables for both. A Older micro USB cable is also included. Many phone cases will have trouble fitting into the remote control phone holder, but the legs are fairly flexible and it is unlikely you will have issues with separation of the phone and remote control unit. The drone is fairly stable and moves well and quickly. It seems to be less stable than my larger drone in even mild windy situations. The app is fairly intuitive and has good features. I do not see a way to provide a glare filter on the very small Gimbal lens. The images are fine in full sunlight. There are quality limitations due to higher end drones in photo and video image quality. The image quality is clear but color and dynamic range are somewhat limited similar to a $100 150 android phone. The app is nice and but lacks polish with spelling errors. The most annoying feature is the very slow down of a full quality video to a phone – A 15 minute video could take more than 20 minutes if it completes before batteries are emptied. Similar to my other drones it is much easier to remove the microSD card. (note one is not supplied with the unit) and simply transferring the video files manually. It is nice that the drone is less than 250 g and does not need to be registered(Unless used for commercial purposes); however, the Registration process is not too difficult. The drone is expensive enough to me that I would be upset if I damaged or lost the drone and I would not consider this a toy, but a lower end full function drone. Drones are very useful in inspecting hard to reach areas and for surveying property.

The Snaptain P40 Lite is a compact and light (249g) drone with several advanced features. It has a low price and is primarily targeted toward new users. It includes a convenient carrying case and can be operated either by the included remote or by an app. It also comes with a video tutorial that makes setup and operation easy. I have not considered a drone for many years. Back then, drones were much larger, crashed too often and were difficult to control, had limited flight time, and had camera systems and features that were not particularly useful. The hobby was more of a drone repair activity than flying. The Snaptain P40 makes flying drones much more pleasant. The 3-axis gimbal 4K camera system, small size, and reasonably long range and flight time allow the user to take quality videos/pictures in difficult environments. (One thing that I will note is because of the lightness of the drone, flying in windy conditions is not advised.) I recommend the Snaptain P40 for anyone interested in the hobby of flying drones and for individuals wanting to get videos/pictures of places that are not easily accessible.

The Snaptain P40 LITE is an 8K (4K video) camera drone. The LITE must refer to its weight and not specs because this is light while packing in a lot of functionality. As this is my first prosumer drone, I spent some time reading up on things and getting ready for my first few flights. There’s a reason this drone is light, being 244g, it’s under that 250g threshold which triggers needing an FAA license to fly. As it is, there’s technically still an FAA test one should take to effectively self certify to fly any drone. But being under the threshold means one can get going quickly and make use of a lot of cool features without necessarily needing to be an expert. There’s pros and cons to this. Pro, almost anyone can get started quickly and enjoy taking some amazing video with the P40 LITE. Con, Snaptain has made a lot of things easy enough to use that newbies, me included, may inadvertently develop bad habits. Getting started was straightforward: unfold the propellers, remove the gimbal cover, plug in the battery, and charge. Since there’s no charging port on the battery itself, you charge it through the drone, which feels a bit limiting. During this time, I grabbed a 256 GB microSD card (max that the P40 LITE takes) to install and installed the app on my phone. While it turns out you can fly the drone without the phone connected - unless you’re a pro, I wouldn’t recommend it. Just with line of sight, I got too close to things, having the camera view itself was useful. That being said, there is a dedicated return to home button on the controller so if you’re flying sans phone and need to be bailed out, there’s an easy to hit button so you don’t panic. After checking again that the gimbal cover was off (I read that this is one of the biggest mistakes newbies make), I powered on the controller, then the P40 LITE. You’re to have the drone on a level surface for this. My practically toy drone does this specifically to calibrate the gyros when powered on. I don’t know if the P40 LITE is doing that as well as the instructions don’t specifically specify this, but as they do specify a level surface, I’m following that every time. With the phone plugged in, you’d launch the app, wait for it to connect, then wait for the drone to be ready to fly. This is mostly waiting for the drone to have good GPS signal. You can fly without it, but it means you’d lose out on having a lot of automatic stabilization features from the drone’s firmware. After having flown the toy drone in light wind and struggling with that, seeing how easy the Snaptain is to fly when set up correctly blew me away. I quickly found my skill plateau, but it’s cool that I now have something that I can use to capture decent video, and then if I want a challenge or to push my flying skills, I can do so.

You’ve got three options for take-off. A stick sequence, using the takeoff icon/button in the app, or the throw away mode. I experimented with all three. The stick sequence did take a couple tries to get right but once I had it, I could repeat every time. The button in the app worked reliably. I never had a crash with my throw away experiments but it did feel like the most sketchy. Essentially holding the drone from the back between the propellers, you’d toss it up or forward. Each time, I was always a bit nervous about clipping my hand or that the drone would not detect being tossed and just topple down. While it’s cool, I don’t actually see a benefit right now. Perhaps if I was doing something where I tossed the drone from a moving vehicle, that I then have it follow, that makes sense. But given that the sequence is tap thru a menu on the app, hit the throw away button, wait for be ready, tilt the drone down, wait for confirmation beep, throw, then it will hover in place after being tossed until you give some command and you should maintain line of sight and keep the controller handy and active, I’m not sure that makes too much sense. It’s a lot of work just to take off when the one key takeoff or stick sequence is much faster. Maybe useful if you’re taking off from uneven terrain or a moving platform, but otherwise, it feels like more hassle than benefit. I was very impressed with the video quality of the P40 LITE. Yes, it could be better, but it’s amazing how great video looks, stabilized, with this 4K sensor from the air. Easily much better than some 360 action cameras. This probably points to the gimbal stabilization being something that lets one extract much better video quality that optical stabilization or post processing. I think one notices the relative camera quality more with still photos, but doing those circle or soaring shots are just amazing. Like the action cams, the drone’s camera quality, video or otherwise, does start to suffer in low light and it’s there that the typically larger sensors do better as they’re just able to get more light. While I expected to do a lot of video capture with me piloting the drone, a lot of the actual good stuff and what I ended up doing for most of the review period is using some of the built in capture modes. I particularly liked the circle and soaring modes where you set a target and the drone takes care of the effect. Retreat or follow are nice for motion shots though none of these are pretty fast. While the drone’s top speed is close to my EUC, it definitely could not keep up. While there was a lot of like, there’s also some things I felt could be better. The P40 Lite sometimes would lose connection (video would go out on my phone) while flying outside the house. Reviewing the recorded video later, there were never any gaps, but the first couple times it did worry me that I’d next see the drone fly away or crash into something. Neither connection gap was ever long enough that the drone came to a stop to hover in place or fly back home and I didn’t want to force testing that in an environment as cluttered as my back yard. Perhaps in a large open park after I’ve gotten more light time under my belt. Another issue was the battery life. Rated for 31 minutes, I never flew longer than about 20 and the one time I went past that, I got a low-battery warning prompting a return-to-home shortly after hitting the 20-minute mark. But more than the relatively short flying time, especially when you’re In the new phase of wanting to fly and try as many things as possible, is that charging takes almost 2 hours which seems a lot for only getting a fraction of that in runtime. There’s a SKU that comes with three batteries and an external charger. I imagine that helps - if you’re religious about going through pre-flight checks, then that’s probably enough that you would always have a full battery coming off the charger if you always pushed things to when the controller makes you return home but I can start to see why someone would graduate to a larger drone to get more runtime.

In all, I feel this was a nice intro to the world of drones beyond the $50 price point. There’s a lot of excitement as you find being able to get nice flyby footage for some family photos or some nice action shots does not require nearly as much skill as you might think. Don’t get me wrong, going beyond what the drone will do for you definitely needs skill and so having video seamlessly transition from one thing to the next requires practice, especially if you yourself are the target but it’s fun to jump in.

I was excited to try this drone as the others I have used in the past were much less expensive and were difficult to fly. This drone is perfect for beginner's because it's easy to fly and takes really good videos. Out of the box the drone is very compact and light weight. It weighs under 250g which apparently means you don't need to register it. It folds into a very small carrying bag that is easy to take with you. After downloading the app, the app walked me through the steps to get started. First step is to pair the drone and then do a calibration. After that it launched with the push of a button (auto takeoff). Not having used a drone like this before it took me a while to figure out what the various modes did. I went to Snaptain's website and watched the first use video, which was very helpful, as some of the controls on the app didn't make sense to me at first. However, after using for a while it became very intuitive. The drone has some very cool functions. I specifically like the follow mode and the gradual retreat. I haven't had a chance yet, but am planning to take a video of my car driving down a windy road to see how the drone performs. The gradual retreat is great for taking pictures and videos of the whole family. There is even a parallel follow mode that keeps the camera near a 90 degree angle to you while it follows. The picture quality is very good. The gimbal does a good job of keeping the video stable and the quality seems similar to my phone camera. The drone has a max flight time of 31 minutes and up to a 6km range; however I couldn't get close to either. My flight time was just over 10 minutes but maybe that's because I was utilizing power for the camera and had it in sport mode. Also, the range I was able to get before it lost signal and auto returned to home was much less than the max. I'm estimating about a mile. It probably can go further in locations that are more clear but I haven't tested that yet. Overall, I'm very happy with this drone. It seems great for a beginner but also seems to have more functionality than other beginner drones.

In the box is the drone, one rechargeable battery, remote controller with built in battery, one battery, 8 spare propellers, USB-C to USB-C Charging Cable, storage box (travel case), screwdriver, screws, RC cables and user manual/information booklet. First Impression - The drone is definitely a big improvement from the current drones that I own. I am really surprised of how stable the drone feels after unboxing. The drone is a lot heavier than it looks and very sturdy. The rotator blades are a huge improvement from the last model that I currently own. I am also happy that the camera is on a gimbal. Battery Life - The battery life is as advertised, about 30 minutes. I was a little disappointed when I opened the bag and noticed there is a section for a second battery but it only came with one. (All of my other drones came with two batteries.) Flight Time/Distance - I was nervous to fly the drone at the allowed distance, so I used it at 100 yards away. (I didn’t want to go the max distance and not be able to retrieve it back.) I did fly it in a field around my home. It flew great, very stable and the controls were very intuitive. The hover mode actually works as intended. Camera/Video - The camera and video is super stable and steady. The camera button on the controller is very convenient and the photo shots are instant with no delay. The camera has the ability to provide a constant aiming point on the screen or gridded lines so that you have a visual reference point. This can be turned on and off as needed. App - I liked the app because it has a built in tutorial and a built in flight check. This allows me to check all of the parts of the drone before flying; to make sure everything is working. I do want to add that the controller has the ability to charge your phone and the controller at the same time. Overall, I really like the new design of this drone and all of the features. I would highly recommend this model to friends and family and I would purchase again.

The Snaptain P40 Lite is an all around excellent drone for what it costs. It has good build quality, great footage, and pretty good run time. In the box you get the drone, remote with built in battery, 1 drone battery, a storage box and several other extras for those inevitable crashes. The initial set up was very easy and you can be up and flying in minutes (after you charge the battery of course). Connecting my phone was easy and opens up a whole new set of features. The battery life is OK, but Id recommend an extra battery so you can fly while one is charging. It flies excellent and is a lot of fun to fly as well. Dont expect super high speeds, but it was plenty fast for me. It also flies very stable as well. It has a lot of great features from much more expensive drones. Follow me, auto land, etc. I look forward to using it to follow me on some motorcycle footage Id like to get. Overall for what you pay this is an amazing drone, with lots of high end features, that is a lot of fun to fly. If your new or a novice to drones this is an excellent choice! And due to its size you wont have to worry about the FAA restrictions that seem to get more strict by the day.

I was really excited to give the Snaptain P40 LITE a try. I planned to test it around my neighborhood and eventually take it out to my farm for some aerial shots of the woods and valley. I haven’t made the farm trip yet, but I did get some solid neighborhood flight time in. The carry case is well designed, with space for everything and a few extras like tools and replacement parts. After charging it up, I had a tough time getting it to connect to my Android phone. It turned out to be a permissions issue. Once that was fixed, the video feed showed up and I was ready to go. I pressed the hover button for takeoff, and it lifted to about five feet before rapidly coming back down and snapping the front support strut. That part helps keep it level when sitting on the ground, so it was disappointing to see it break within the first minute. I may be able to glue it back, but still not a great first impression. Once airborne, it flew well and was easier to control than older toy drones I’ve used. The hover mode is smooth, and the 3-axis gimbal does a good job keeping the camera steady. Just know you will need a microSD card if you want to record video. The GPS return-to-home function is cool but aggressive. It flew back at me full speed, and I had to jump back as it landed. Fun, but a bit intense. Overall, the drone is feature-packed and takes decent footage, especially for the price. I’d say it’s worth a look for beginners, but don’t expect top-tier durability.

The Snaptain P40 Lite 3-Axis Gimbal 8K Camera Drone Is a perfect drone for the hobbyist. Straight out of the box, it was very self-explanatory. However, it does not come with charging blocks, so you will need to make sure you have a couple of charging blocks. Once you have found your charging blocks and have them fully charged. Setting it up was a breeze; it took all of a few button pushes and an app to download. Now, when it comes to flying the drone, that is definitely the fun part. If this is your first drone, follow the training that comes with the app. Once you have completed the training, you’ll be ready to fly around and take some amazing photos and videos. I can tell you from experience, do not fly this in the house if you have eight-foot ceilings unless you are very sure of your piloting skills. The controls are very smooth and the gimbal movement is not steady as well. Overall, this is a fantastic drone. Now, as for flight time, it could use some improvement and a little more warning. I began flying mine with 50% battery, and the next thing I knew, I was receiving a warning stating it was about to land, and it did within seconds. However, overall, this is a great drone and I would highly recommend it. It’s my fourth drone to own, and I truly enjoy flying it.

An excellent choice, small compact and reliable , i am confident this drone will help in my business ventures