I owned a P3P for a week. In that time I flew 14 times before I returned it. I now own a Solo and I'm much happier even without the gimbal...there was a brief stint with a Parrot BeBop but that lasted all of 1 horrible flight before I slapped it back into the box and returned it.
- The Solo seems to be of a higher-quality materials and construction build. The P3P always felt just a bit cheap to me. I wasn't surprised when the stories of shells cracking started to appear. The Solo just feels more solid and, in my opinion, a better looking piece of equipment.
- I never really saw the range that Lightbridge was supposed to offer. The video feed on my iPad Mini 2 was always choppy although it was smoother on my iPhone 6 plus. I had trouble getting video past 3000 feet with the P3P. On the Solo my Mini works fine and I've only seen video issues at the far end of it's range. I have added $10 after-market antennas to the Solo and instead of 800'-1200' I'm seeing 2200'-2500' range over heavy wifi areas like my subdivision. the furthest I've been able to go was 5280' over flat farmland at 400' altitude and I still had one bar of signal. Also, the video feed on that run was perfect...no jitter or lag even a mile out.
- The firmware update process on the P3P is terrible...took 3 hours to do due to poor documentation on DJIs side. The Solo updated in a minute and was good to go.
- The CSC stick commands that could shut down the P3P motors mid-flight always made me hesitant to make any sudden stick moves or course corrections...there were just too many horror stories of it happening to make me feel comfortable when I took the P3P out. Would it have ever happened? Probably not, but it was always on my mind when I flew.
- The P3P can very easily tip on landing. If you don't immediately cut the motors there is an excellent chance of a tip or drift and boom, your buying props. I much prefer the landing on the Solo. the P3P also seems very "hoppy" when trying to land, I'm not sure if this was from the ground vision system kicking in or what but it would frequently jump 1'-2' a few times unless I brought it in very slowly.
- the P3P is excellent out of the box but can be a bit intimidating when going into the deeper functions of the app and the drone itself...there is very little information or documentation on the more advanced functions of the app and for a relative novice like myself this was an issue. I found the Solo Flight School vids answered almost all the questions I had before flying.
- The flexibility of the GoPro camera and the ability to use it in multiple ways, to me, justifies the added camera expense.
These are just my opinions, I purchased the P3P and the Solo as a "next step" product in my drone\quad experience so I'm not qualified to speak on the cameras or photo quality as such...I'll leave that to the photo\video experts.
All in all I'm happy with my purchase and can't wait to see what comes next
