The Potensic Atom is a 4K sub-250g drone that you can fly almost anywhere. It has a 3-axis gimbal, up to 6km pof range, long battery life and several flight modes you don’t often see on a drone at this price point.
I’ll run through all its features and thoroughly test its capabilities, to see if this might be the right drone for you. Towards the end of the video I’ll discuss how it compares to the similarly priced DJI Mini 4K and the DJI Neo I just reviewed.
So let’s take a closer look!
Overview
You can either get the Standard Atom kit with a single battery, the controller, an assortment of cables and four spare blades or Potensic do the Combo kit I have here. This comes with 2 additional batteries so a total of 3 batteries, a fast charging hub, a carry case, a 64GB microSD card and 8 spare blades. I’ll discuss later whether the Combo kit might be a worthwhile purchase.
If you purchase the standalone drone you can charge the battery with the included USB-C charging cable in or out of the drone at around 15W, if your charger supports 5V at 3A. A full charge of the 2230mAh, 17.18Wh battery should take just under one and a half hours but in my tests with a fully capable charger it took it little longer – around one hour 40 minutes to charge a completely flat battery.
The Combo kit has the charging hub that can fast charge all three batteries included in the Combo kit at up to 60W using the included AC adapter with a DC jack. I’d much prefer USB-C charging but the batteries do charge in parallel, not one at a time like on many of DJI’s changing hubs. And all three batteries can be charged in under one and a half hours.
The controller is charged via USB-C and if you have the charging hub there’s a USB-A port that you can use with the supplied USB-A to USB-C cable to charge it while you’re charging the batteries. Disappointingly you can’t use the charging hub as a portable power pack – the USB-A output only works when the charging hub is connected to the mains. The controller also charges quite slowly at just 7.5W. Its smaller capacity, integrated 3000mAh, 11.1Wh battery also requires around one and half hours to charge.
The Atom has a very similar design to other mini sub 250g drones like the DJI Mini series. The build quality is pretty good but doesn’t feel as sturdy as my DJI drones.
After unclipping the gimbal protector and removing the strap securing the blades I weighed the drone at exactly 240g.
There’s no built-in storage on the drone so you’ll need to insert a microSD card in the slot just above the battery with the card’s logo facing up.
Unfold the top arms and then the bottom arms, in that order, and then turn on the drone with a short and then long press of the power button. Place the drone on a flat surface and prepare the controller. Screw in the control sticks that are stored in the base of the controller, attach the appropriate USB-C cable to your phone. I’m using the USB-C to USB-C cable for my iPhone 15 Pro Max but they thoughtfully include a Lightning and even a micro-USB cable for older phones.
Fold up the antennas and slide in your phone with the cable on the right hand side. It fits into the notch on the controller. My phone is pretty large and even with its thick leather case it fits in just fine.
Turn on the controller with a long press of the power button and open the Potensic Pro app. Tap on Enter Device. You’ll see a live view of the drone’s camera. Wait for the drone to acquire enough GPS satellites for the red indicator to turn green and you’re ready to take off. The quickest way to take off is to pull both joysticks back and to the centre of the controller simultaneously which turns on the motors.
Then push the left joystick up to launch the drone into the air. You can also tap the take-off button on the left on the screen and swipe right to take off.
Let the drone hover for a short while until you see that the Home point has been updated. Just in case you run into trouble and the drone needs to return to home – which I’ll discuss shortly.
The drone has standard controls. The left joystick controls the height and orientation, the right joystick the forward, backward, left and right movements.
If you’ve never flown a drone before, the right controls can take a bit of getting used to, since it depends on which direction you’re facing.
You can tap on the left front record button to switch to video recording or start recording if you’re already in video mode. Press the right front button to switch to photo capture or take a photo if you’re already in photo mode.
In video mode tap on resolution to set the resolution and frame rate up to 4K 30 fps. You can also tap on exposure compensation to adjust the exposure. Right of exposure compensation you can toggle between SD card time remaining and storage usage.
You can tap on manual exposure to set ISO, shutter speed and WB manually – if the conditions aren’t too variable.
In photo mode you can tap JPG to switch to JPG+RAW mode which takes up more storage space but gives you more control over the capture if you want to edit the RAW photo. You’ll still have a JPG photo you can instantly share.
Just as in video mode you’ve also got control over exposure compensation and full manual controls.
Below the video record button you’ve got a dial to control the gimbal tilt from +20° to -90° facing straight down. The only other button I’ve not mentioned is the Return to Home button. A long press triggers a return to home and a short press pauses an automatic flight.
There are no physical buttons on the controller to change flight speed, but you can switch between video, normal and sport mode under Settings.
Video mode is the slowest speed for the smoothest video footage and Sport mode is the fastest speed at up to 16m/s – that’s 58km/h or 36mph – which is a lot of fun to fly, but video footage will suffer.
While we’re in Settings, in the Safety tap we can also configure Return to Home settings. In the Calibration tab we can calibrate the compass and gimbal if need be and we can re-pair another drone.
The Control tab lets you switch Control Stick mode if you have a preference and offers some advanced gimbal configuration. The Camera tab lets you set White balance and enable an overlay and the About tab lets you check the current Firmware.
Back on the main screen you can tap the smaller map screen to enlarge the map view and shrink the live video feed.
The map view very usefully shows your home position, the controller location and the direction the drone is flying, which makes it easy to keep track of the drone.
If you tap on the little blue Attitude icon you can switch the smaller thumbnail view to the Attitude indicator mode which also shows your home and controller location and direction but also displays the drone tilt. If this display turns red the drone is flying at too steep a tilt angle and is most likely experiencing strong winds. It’s worth getting to grips with this display – it can be very useful even if it initially looks a little intimidating.
I’ll discuss the various flight modes shortly in the performance section, but to land the drone you can press and hold the return to home button but I’d recommend flying the drone manually back to above its launching pad and then pulling down on the left controller. You can still make small adjustments when the drone starts its landing routine. Alternatively when the drone is above the landing pad you can tap the landing icon. This works well if you want to land the drone on your outstretched hand which is sometimes more convenient.
I’d only really fly a drone like this outside using GPS, but the drone can use its Downward Vision System which consists of a camera and infrared sensor on the bottom of the drone to fly indoors in Opti mode. You’ll see OPTI displayed in the live view as opposed to GPS. This system is also used when landing the drone either on a mat or in your hand.
If for any reason there’s no GPS and the Downward Vision System fails, the drone will enter Attitude mode with ATTI displayed in the live view. This is complete manual control so you’ll need to exercise additional caution,
You can preview footage off the drone via the app. Just tap on the gallery icon. Here you can also download a low resolution 720p version of the capture, but you’re better off removing the microSD card and importing the full resolution files via your computer,
Performance
The Atom has a 4K camera with a ⅓” sensor and a fixed focus F2.2 lens all mounted on a 3-axis gimbal. In bright conditions the image quality is generally pretty good.
I would have liked some control over sharpness and noise reduction – the video quality does look a little over sharpened and over processed, but I still think most people would be more than happy with the image quality considering the price of the drone.
It does struggle flying into bright sunlight, sometimes failing to quickly adjust exposure levels and as you’d expect with its small sensor, low light performance is not great. Although it was probably slightly better than I expected.
I mostly shot at 4K 30fps but you can get a higher frame rate of up to 60fps if you shoot at 1080P. This will allow you to slow down footage but bizarrely this mode crops into the centre of the 4K frame, changing the field of view from 78° in 4K mode to just 36°, so effectively zooming in around 2x.
There is also a 12MP photo mode, but unless you’re going to enable RAW and post-process the image, the quality is similar to just capturing a frame from a video which is far more convenient.
The Atom’s remote controller uses Potensic’s PixSync 3.0 transmission technology with up to 6km range according to their marketing. You need to make sure the antennas are positioned correctly, but even then I found the live 720p feed to my smartphone broke up far earlier than that. Sometimes this resulted in the transmission missing a few frames and appearing jerky, but I also had the display break up completely and on two occasions I had the drone initiating its Return to Home. At least I was able to test this feature which works very well and is reassuring, especially for new users. By default the drone will ascend to 120m when the signal is lost which does usually give you a chance to reconnect to the drone. You can turn this feature off in the Safety tab if you like. If you do regain a connection you can cancel Return to Home and continue flying the drone manually.
To be fair to Potensic, they do state that their 6km range is based on a flight height of 120m which is much higher than I usually fly the drone.
As well as automatically initiating a Return to Home when it loses signal, the drone will also Return to Home automatically with a low battery. And you can manually initiate a Return to Home with a long press of the dedicated button on the controller. I found it returned to within a metre or so of where it took off – there’s enough time to control it manually just before it lands to ensure it ends up on the launch pad.
The drone’s battery life is up to 32 minutes according to Potensic and depending on the wind and the speed I flew the drone I got somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes which is pretty good. The controller’s battery life is less impressive at just over two hours, so you need to remember to charge the controller after every 3 or 4 full flights with the drone. It’s a shame the controller can’t run off the drone’s battery. It’s easy to forget to charge the controller and since it’s connected to your phone via its charging port, you can’t charge it during a flight. The controller also appears to charge your phone. You should be able to disable this to preserve the battery life of the controller.
The Atom has a wind level resistance rating of 5 which equates to wind speeds of up to 38km/h or 24mph. It does cope remarkably well for such a small drone. I flew it in some very strong winds and I could still happily control the drone, and the footage wasn’t bad either. Even without checking the Attitude display, you do get helpful warnings when it’s windy recommending you either reduce the height of the drone or initiate Return to Home.
The weather’s been pretty bad while I’ve been testing this drone, and on a couple of occasions I’ve also had a little rain as well as the strong winds. I landed the drone as quickly as I could but although it has no claims to be even slightly waterproof it’s not done any damage.
You can hear how the drone sounds in the video, but it’s not too noisy and in comparison to the DJI Neo I just reviewed it’s far less offensive, to my ear at least.
I’ve not yet covered the various intelligent flight modes of the drone. First off there are the 5 Quickshots shooting modes. Tap on the Quickshot icon and choose from Pull-away, Rocket, Circle, Spiral and Boomerang. It’s all pretty self explanatory. You can set various parameters including distance and then tap on Go. The drone will perform the Quickshot and record a short very sharable clip to the SD card. Just be aware that the drone has no obstacle avoidance so make sure you have enough space around you!
There’s also Visual Tracking. Tap on Visual Tracking and drag a rectangle over the object or person you want to track. The Atom can automatically select a person – you’ll see a + icon – just tap on that to select and tap on Go. I tried this walking across a field and it worked pretty well. You do need to make sure the drone has some height so you can angle the gimbal at least 25° downwards otherwise the drone won’t let you select a subject. According to Potensic, tracking is supported at up to 29km/h or 18mph – but you’d have to be pretty brave trying this feature out at those speeds without any obstacle avoidance!
Finally you can set up a Waypoint flight. This is a great feature for a drone at this price. Tap on the thumbnail of the map and then the Waypoint icon. You can zoom in on the map and tap various points on the map to create a route. Then tap on Go to start the flight. You can adjust the height and gimbal tilt during the flight.
Conclusions
The Potensic Atom has a lot going for it. It has a lot of features for an entry level drone including waypoint flights and visual tracking. It’s super easy to fly and in sport mode it’s pretty fast too which makes it a lot of fun. It’s missing any obstacle avoidance, but it does have a reliable Return to Home function that works if you lose your signal or the battery level is deemed too low. And it can be enabled manually if you’re lost sight of the drone, or you just want to bring it back home automatically.
Image quality is ok in the right conditions and it actually coped better in low light than I was expecting. But it struggled when lighting conditions changed and the image can look a little over processed.
I also had an issue with the first drone I was sent – the image quality looked quite soft. I was quickly sent another one and from my interactions with Potensic and their Amazon reviews, support is pretty good. But I’d still recommend purchasing from somewhere with decent returns like Amazon just in case you run into any difficulties.
I’d love to see obstacle avoidance in this next version, and I’m not a huge fan of the charging hub included in the Combo kit. I’m not sure why it couldn’t be charged via USB Power Delivery. Having to carry around a proprietary AC adapter is annoying. And it also can’t use the USB-A output without the mains connection – so you can’t use it in an emergency to charge the controller, or your phone.
You could save a fair bit of money just purchasing the drone on its own. A single battery has a decent amount of run time, and the battery can be charged via USB-C.
Unfortunately Potensic charge way too much for a spare battery, so if you do want a spare, you’re probably better off with the Combo kit – and you get the nice case too.
Potensic does have stiff competition from DJI. Their Mini 4K can often be had for a similar price and offers better build quality, range and image quality but it does lack waypoint mode and visual tracking. There’s also the DJI Neo I just reviewed. You need to get the Fly More Combo version with the controller for a direct comparison, but that is around the same price or cheaper than the Atom Combo kit. It has palm take off and some truly impressive autonomous flight modes and it’s super rugged – I’ve crashed it several times and it barely has a scrape. But it doesn’t have the waypoint mode and it only has a single axis gimbal with only average image quality.
Overall the Potensic Atom is a well featured, capable drone which is easy and a lot fun to fly and is worth considering if you’re looking for a 4K sub-250g drone at this price point.
Don’t forget to take a look at my YouTube video at the top of the page, and again please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I’m releasing videos every week on the latest technology and how to get the most out of it. If you tap the bell icon when you subscribe you’ll get a notification as soon as I release a video, and there’ll be a link to my site here for the written article. YouTube is also the best place to leave a comment. I read all of them and respond to as many as I can!
The links below are affiliate links:
Potensic Atom 4K Drone: https://amzn.to/3BEzx6V
DJI Neo: https://amzn.to/3BjhzXI
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