When I stepped into the Drone Zone at CES, I was greeted by not three (DJI, Yuneec, and 3DR), as seen at AUVSI and NAB, but probably more than a dozen very high quality, professional looking drone booths. AEE, Hubsan, and other toy companies have moved seriously upmarket and new entrants like Xiro and Ehang had seemingly very high quality products on display. Without further ado, here are some of my favorites.

For those of you who didn’t see it in the mainstream news cycle, the Ehang flying car stole the show. Yes, the company that Kickstarted its way to the fairly pathetic Ghost had the most impressive presence in the drone area.

Phantom, Bepop, and Inspire clones for days. There were literally hundreds of these on display. It’s not clear if the drone industry has converged on several basic designs because they are best, similar to the auto industry, or, more likely, fast following is winning over true innovation.The Yuneec H920 integrated with a Pansonic GH4. This is the first time I’ve seen one in real life and it seems far too large to be practical. I would far rather lug around Inspire, assuming the X5 RAW matches the GH4 quality, for professional aerial video capture.

The new collision avoiding Yuneec Typhoon H. This hex feels much, much higher quality than the Typhoon 4K (my Typhoon 4K fell out of the sky, likely due to an ESU failure within 5 minutes of pulling it out of the box), but still shares the same chintzy gimbal. Yuneec has made some huge strides with this product.

Black Inspire 1 Pro with X5R looks mean.

Gimbaled FLIR Vue for Inspire enables easy aerial thermal imaging.
6 months after release, Xiro has already revved the Xplorer. Xplorer 2 appears to have a spinning LIDAR collision avoidance system. The fit and finish is great and they upgraded to an integrated 4K camera. I have an original Xplorer and was generally impressed with the performance until the cheap battery latch failed on my third flight and I was permanently grounded due to a $0.10 part failing.