Sony took the stage at CES 2021 yesterday and gave it’s first update on the Sony Airpeak drone announced months ago.
This time last year I had just returned from CES2020 in Las Vegas. Walking the show floor, talking to reps at giant booths put up by DJI, Autel and others. And just generally having my mind blown by the wave of new technologies heading our way. If you ever get the chance I highly recommend it.
Thanks to a pandemic, this year I’m doing CES virtually from my ‘home office’. Instead of having the convention floor almost to myself I spent media day pouring thru buckets of B-roll video provided by the Consumer Technology Association and various brands to pair with our content. Different days indeed.
Last year it was Autel’s release of the EVO II Series of drones that grabbed the drone attention at CES 2020. So far this year it is Sony.
Last year Sony announced that it was making a drone, called Airpeak, but almost no details have emerged since .
Now Sony is teasing us with a short video that introduces the Matrice-like quadcopter as a professional-level drone designed to carry their Alpha series of cameras for pro photography and video production.
Airpeak is operated by a pilot with a flight controller while the camera and gimbal is run separately by a 2nd operator. Airpeak has two massive batteries and a forward vision camera gimbal for flight view.
The long pair of legs, almost identical to what you see on a Matrice series drone, retracts up and out of the line of sight of the payload camera after take-off.
No release date for the Sony Airpeak is provided, but based on the comments by Sony last year, the target is still Spring 2021.
With Airpeak, Sony is aiming squarely at market-leader DJI which has already made adaptions to it’s drones to accomodate the widely-adopted line of Sony Alpha cameras. In October of last year DJI released improved versions of it’s Ronin RS and RSC gimbals for mirrorless cameras to further cement it’s camera stabilizers to a growing crowd of Sony Alpha loyalists.
