Drones come in many shapes and sizes. At their most affordable, drones are fun flying toys. And for industrial uses or professional filmmakers, you've got specialist machines that can run well into tens of thousands of dollars. Parrot's new $700 Anafi falls somewhere in between, balancing a decent camera and plenty of features with a price tag that isn't prohibitively expensive. DJI is the dominant player in drones right now.

Parrot was one of the first (if not the absolute first) companies to take a crack at the consumer drone space. The AR Drone came out in 2010 (!), and Parrot followed it up a solid upgrade in the AR Drone 2.0 a few years later. Since then, we've seen the Bebop, some clever flying toys, and had a bunch of fun with the fixed-wing Disco. But at this point, most consumers probably think DJI when they think of camera drones, because of how pervasive Phantoms and Mavics are. It's not like this caught Parrot by surprise or anything--two years ago, they saw the direction that the market was trending, and started working on a completely new consumer platform designed to be exceptionally easy to use and exceptionally portable, with the ability to produce exceptionally good aerial videos. Earlier last month, Parrot announced the Anafi, a US $700 consumer camera drone with a unique design and some unique features, coupled with the sort of thoughtful usability that we've come to expect from Parrot. We got a pretty good look at the drone in New York City, and have been trying one out over the past weeks. At Parrot's event in NYC, CEO Henri Seydoux introduced the drone with pictures like this: The idea, Seydoux said, was to build a drone like an insect, with a head (camera), thorax (electronics), and abdomen (battery).

Parrot may have scaled back its drone division and shifted some of its focus toward workers, but that doesn't mean it's downplaying the consumer side of things. The company has unveiled the Anafi, a folding drone that takes some not-so-subtle potshots at DJI's Mavic Air. It's not just the portability -- the Anafi touts a 21-megapixel camera that promises 4K HDR video at 100Mbps, including 2.8X lossless zoom. The camera isn't good as the Mavic Air's in some respects, as it's only using two-axis mechanical stabilization (software and a wide lens handle the third axis). Still, it represents a big improvement over the 1080p video and no-gimbal design of Parrot's Bebop drones. The flight time is a solid but unspectacular 25 minutes (extendable by charging from a USB-C battery bank) with a 2.5-mile range, although Parrot is promising "super quiet flights."