Razor62 - the photo you included in your first post certainly looks unusually poor. As others have said above, the Bebop 2 camera certainly has its limitations compared to more expensive drones with a mechanical gimbal, but I've found it's capable of producing very nice 1080p video and acceptable still images in the right conditions - i.e. plenty of light and not much wind. Here's a still from mine, straight out of the camera, just on the default JPG mode:
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To understand the limitations of the camera compared to your smartphone, the Bebop 2 has a smartphone-sized (i.e. small) sensor with a native resolution of 3320x4096 pixels, or 13.5MP. This sits behind a fixed aperture, fixed focus fisheye lens. The image the Bebop2 actually sees looks like this:
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To produce the 1080p video image, the Bebop picks out a 1920x1080 section of the image (which I've drawn on as a white rectangle above). This is how the electronic gimbal works - as you tilt up and down you're just moving this frame up and down in the image. The electronic image stabilisation is also continually shifting the frame and rotating it to compensate for the drone's movement and keep the horizon level. This is why if the drone is battling high winds, in particular if the 'gimbal' is already tilted a long way up or down, you see black arcs appearing from time to time at the edges of the video, as the motion compensation moves the frame 'off the edge' of the image circle.
The image then has to be processed to correct for the distortion in the 180 degree fisheye view. The further your gimbal is from the centre the more distorted the original image and hence the more processing required, so you'd expect image quality to be slightly better when the camera is close to the centre (although that said I've shot plenty of straight-down footage and I must say I've not noticed any particular loss in quality).
Finally noise compensation is applied, which can reduce detail in poor light. I suspect there's a fair bit of sharpening applied also, as I've noticed that scenes with lots of well-defined edges tend to look nice and sharp, whereas foliage can look a bit blurry.
Given the tiny sensor and the amount of processing that's being applied to every frame I'm actually blown away by how good the end result is. In good sunlight and low winds it's possible to get some excellent quality HD footage, as evidenced by some of the videos you can find on youtube. But it's never going to be as good as something with a 4k camera on a mechanical gimbal, which has to do far less processing and has much higher resolution to start with.
Hope that's of help,
Speagles2
