Lily Camera

Selfie sticks and drones are changing the way we take pictures, but both devices have their limitations. The selfie stick is great if you are on a stable surface, but may place you in danger if you are in motion, while a drone-cam usually needs a remote pilot to capture you in action; and if you’re trying to take a selfie of a huddled group, you’d be looking at the remote set while everyone else looks at the camera. The Lily Camera is here to fix all this.

Designed for people who simply want to click aerial pictures without the bother of flying a drone, the Lily is a drone with a 12 MP camera. All you need to get the drone to fly is to wear its tracker on your wrist and throw the drone into the air; it senses this and starts flying. Once you start moving, the drone will follow you around and take pictures. You need no remote-flying skills.

The body of the Lily is completely sealed, so you can take it with you in the rain or shoot water sports if you want. Using a combination of GPS and visual tracking, the puck on your hand lets the drone know where you are and it calculates distance and speed required to keep up with you.

You can set the drone to circle around you to take a panoramic shot from a height, follow you, or capture your actions from in front.

The 12 megapixel camera can take both stills and full high definition 1,080/60p videos, as well as a slow motion clips—120 frames per second video at 720p. There is a microphone on the puck to record sound, and the recording is in sync with the camera hovering above.

The drone in this case is only to be used as a follow-on or lead or rotate device and will not let you fly to capture cities and videos like other drones do. Flying it, however, is a breeze. It flies 5 to 50 feet above the ground and can get as close as 5 feet to you or shoot those wide shots from as far as 100 feet away.

The photos and videos are stored in its 4 GB memory, which can be expanded by popping in a micro SD card. The battery time on this drone is limited to 20 minutes, and no, you can’t carry a spare battery. It takes about two hours to recharge.

Currently, the Lily Camera is available for $499 on pre-order. It will be selling in the open market by February next for $999.

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