T-motor FALCON 15 HD 95mm Cinewhoop – provided for a review by Banggood

If you are looking for a drone that is between a tiny whoop and 3 incher that also has an HD recording capability, then the Falcon 15 HD is an option that you should take into consideration.

It is based on the Transtec Demon 95 micro drone with a few changes made by T-Motor

What’s in the box:

It comes neatly packed in a plastic box convenient to carry the drone with enough space for batteries and replacement parts. The package includes

Obviously, the drone
2 spare canopies,
4 spare propguards,
4 propellers,
hex tool for removing the canopy,
battery strap
a wire for connecting the receiver

The specs:

Falcon 15 HD

95mm size
20x20mil stack,
Omnibus F4 SD based flight controller with built-in that also has a barometer,
15A 4 in 1 BlHeli-s ESCs,
T-MOTOR F15 1106 6000KV,
25~50mW VTx with Smart Audio and
Gemfan 2040 twobolt props.

Weight: 90 grams
Base plate thickness: 2mm

The weight is 90 grams without the battery strap and a receiver and has a 2mm base plate and arms.
Clear ABS canopy and prop guards
The HD camera is Caddx Turtle V2 with plastic lens

Internals:

It comes with Betaflight 3.2
The Betaflight is preconfigured, but it is using the default PID values, so you will have to tune it in order to get it to fly well.
There was no manual included in my box so I had to search for it on google and found similar manual intended for the regular Falcon F15

 

Test flight:

Here is a recorded video directly from the SD Card. I have done two flights, one by day and one during the night.

Both flights were done with the default tune and camera settings in order for you to see what kind of footage you can get out of the box.
There was no visible jello in the footage, only some tuning imperfections. This is to be expected based on the quality of the components and overal build.
The camera seems to have the default settings. It is advisable to turn down the sharpening a little bit and add it in post afterwards in order to avoid sharpening artifacts.
The night footage looks decent, a bit less sharp than the one taken during the day with a bit visible noise.
Let me conclude this video with a few pros and cons regarding my experience with the T-Motor Falcon 15 HD

PROS:

• 2mm strong carbon base plate able to withstand abuse
• This one uses F4 processor instead of the F3 used on the non-HD version
• High quality motors
• Even though the propguards could be more sturdier in my experience after few crashes it seems that they serve their purpose
• There is an included battery mat, something that other manufacturers forget to provide
• A nice plus is that T-Motor were kind enough to provide two spare canopies and 4 propguards
• The HD video quality is good with no visible signs of jello.
• The way this drone is constructed enables you to adjust the camera angle and remove the propguards from the camera field of view and fly slow enough at the same time
• Great build quality
• Flies really nice

CONS:

• The overall weight combined with the 1106 motors results in below than average flight times. I have got 1 minute of flight time on 2S 300mAh battery.
• There is no BNF version. It is not suitable for beginners.
• Barometer only for displaying height, must use iNav for althod
• No glass lens on the Caddx Turtle camera
• Please note that the motors are remapped in BetaFlight 1-3 2-4. This is probably to save some assembly time, but is is bad practice. After updating to BetaFlight 3.5.2 I have had an flipping on arm issue altough the board alignment was correctly set in BetaFlight. It took me a while to figure.
• While testing on 3S battery I have noticed that the default PID tune seems a bit high resulting in a bit shaky video, which was not an issue on 2S.
• The installed BetaFlight version has no Dshot beacon support and since there is no buzzer, the Dshot beacon functionality is necessary for you to lessen your worries of loosing your drone.
• The VTx antenna placement is not ideal and the signal reception could be better, even on 50mW
• There was no manual included in my box

Is this the right drone for you?
One of the things that I liked about this micro cine drone is that there was no jello in the footage, even on a bright sunny days. So if you are willing to spend some time on upgrading the firmware, improving the tune and fiddling with the Caddx settings, this could turn out to be a really great micro cine drone.