Air Hogs Hawk Eye Channel A Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I am currently preparing to attend a large convention when this item caught my eye in the store. $60 at Target, for a remote controlled flying eye in the sky, I had to give it a try.
Note: I have never used an Air Hogs copter before today, so some things I say below may be limitations of the toy line and not entirely the fault of this particular product.
The Good:
The box claimed it took video in 320 x 240 and pictures in 640 x 480. In reality, it takes both pictures and video in full 640 x 480. The quality of the video itself, while not up to the standards of an iPhone, are surprisingly high quality. I'll admit to expecting horrible grainy little videos from a kid's toy, but I could easily read magazine covers.
Also good, its pretty durable. While getting the hang of flying this thing, I crashed it into every conceivable surface and object. I sent it into twirling dives from the top of the ceiling, and it has survived beautifully. I definitely feel like it would take a much stronger hit than this little guy could ever generate on it's own to actually damage it (and this is with a friend using it for mid air target practice with his Nerf Maverick).
The Bad:
Its an infra-red controller. Infra-red (IR) is the same stuff that makes your TV remote work. If you've ever tried changing channels with out pointing the remote right at the TV, you know the limitations this brings. You have to constantly point the controller right at the copter to maintain control, which can be annoying when you start focusing on the copter and don't realize you're dropping the controller down too low. Also means you need to stay relatively close, seems to be an upwards limit of about 20' or so.
Don't try to have this thing lift off from the ground. It always starts to tip a bit and lets the rotors hit the floor. You pretty much have to hand launch it every time.
The Ugly:
The pictures you see of this thing are CGI mockups, it is *NOT* the actual unit you get. The pictures make it look like it has a hard plastic shell, it doesn't. The main body is a medium hard styrofoam like material. It makes it much more shock resistant, but it doesn't look as high tech and pretty as the pictures make it appear.
It also has a bad habit of needing to be re-trimmed if it crashes, which will be fairly constant until you get fairly good at controlling it. Trimming means adjusting it via the controller to stop it from spinning around in the air. If it isn't trimmed properly, turning it will be very difficult, and getting any good video out of it will be next to impossible (all you'll have is a blur of the room spinning around and around).
Overall Verdict:
It was worth the $60 I paid for it at Target, as the camera is of surprisingly good quality, its durable enough to suffer some major abuse, and lets face it, we can all think of a million uses for a flying video camera. I don't think its worth the $100 that Amazon here is asking though, so definitely shop around.

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