The Elanview Cicada ($399) promises a lot of features at a very reasonable price, but it doesn't quite deliver. The small drone works with a smartphone companion app so you can see what its camera is recording and control it with your device, just like the Parrot Bebop. But it's not nearly as stable in the air as the Bebop, and its video quality lags behind as well. Our Editors' Choice drone is still the DJI Phantom 3 Professional, which is much more expensive. Drones are still a nascent category, and at this point, you really need to open your wallet if you're looking for a high-quality copter.

Design and Controls
The Cicada is very small for a drone, measuring just 3.4 by 9.4 by 9.4 inches (HWD) and weighing in at just over half a pound. Our review unit is black with silver accents and props, but it can also be had in a white body with red, teal, or yellow accents. The motors point downward, and are protected by propeller guards. Two sets of spare propellers are included, as is a small screwdriver to change them out when (not if) damage occurs.

The drone broadcasts a Wi-Fi network—the random string of numbers and letters that show after the word Cicada in the SSID is the password to connect. Once you've paired it with your Android or iOS device, you can control the Cicada using the free Elanview app. The app shows a live feed from the front camera, and give you access to flight and camera controls. The latter are pretty limited—you can switch between image and video mode, take a picture, and start or stop recording, but that's it.

The flight controls are pretty basic as well, but functional. An on-screen directional pad on the left side of the display (you'll hold your phone in landscape orientation when using the Cicada) adjusts altitude and yaws the aircraft on its axis. The right moves it forward, backward, left, and right. There are two alternative modes available—one that lets you tilt the phone in any direction while your finger is touching the right half of the screen to move the aircraft, and another that replaces the directional pads with virtual joysticks that perform the same functions.

To take off, press and hold the Take Off button at the bottom of the screen. When the engines are on it switches to a Cut Off button, which is used to immediately cut power to the engines. At the top of the display is Go Home, which is to bring the aircraft back to its launch point when flying with GPS enabled.

Performance
The Cicada has GPS, so when you're flying outdoors it should be fairly stable in the air. On a clear, breezeless day that's somewhat true, but even under ideal conditions I found that the drone drifted noticeably. To be fair, the Parrot Bebop does the same thing, but the Bebop handles light winds better than the Cicada. I tried to fly on a day with occasional light gusts, and they sent the aircraft moving through the sky uncontrollably.

The GPS often takes a long time to lock onto a signal, but thankfully the drone won't take off until it establishes a lock. You should try to avoid flying under trees, though, as they're enough to block the satellite signal and make the Cicada fly even more erratically than it normally does.

Under ideal conditions the Cicada does a better job. I was able get it up to 30 feet in the air, and had pretty stable control over it; I wasn't worried about it ending up on a roof. But I wouldn't take it up that high on a moderately windy day. For low altitude flying, a few feet above the ground, I was able to fly without crashing on a calm day, but with moderate wind the drone ended up crashing several times.

As far as indoor flight goes: just don't. Without GPS the drone is difficult to control, and you're liable to damage it or something inside hour house, or to injure yourself. The Cicada puts out enough power to blow an empty pizza box off of a kitchen table—I don't want to think about what its blades would do to my flesh. This is an outdoor toy.

The worst crash I experienced was actually on a perfectly calm day. I had been flying the Cicada for about 12 minutes, recording video the whole time, and decided to test its Go Home function. I moved it to about 15 feet away from the takeoff position, so it would have a clear, straight path to return. Instead of coming straight at me—the 12 o'clock direction—it moved in the direction of 2 o'clock at a very high speed. I wasn't able to cut the engine before it slammed violently into the side of my home.

Thankfully no real damage was done to the unit—one of the prop guards broke off on impact and I had to replace a broken propeller—but once that was done it got up in the air with no problem. You should be careful when replacing the props, as the tiny screws used to secure them can be lost easily, and no spare screws are in the box. As far as I can tell, there's no way to buy replacement guards either, so you might be left with a drone that's not quite complete. The Bebop, which also has a tendency to crash, has replaceable foam bumpers. They're pretty substantial—I had a few scrapes and scuffs when flying with it, but never broke a prop.

I did lose my video clip in the crash. The Cicada saved a 600MB MOV file to the microSD card, but it was corrupt. The manual states that you can use the app to fix a video clip if this happens, but I was unable to recover the footage. Neither QuickTime nor VLC could play the file on the card, and an attempt to use the VideoConverterUltimate application to transcode the file didn't work either—I ended up with a garbled mess of moving multi-colored rectangles. It's not a great loss—we're not talking about the lost cut of The Magnificent Ambersons here—but you'll see a little less footage of a tree in my yard in the sample reel above because of it.

Video is recorded in QuickTime format at 1080p30 quality with no sound. Elanview calls the lens fish-eye, and while it certainly shows some distortion and captures a very wide field of view, I wouldn't describe it as such. I found that the video was overexposed a bit when shooting outdoors, and that aerial footage was extremely wobbly. In one instance I started recording a clip and it showed severe underexposure, giving the footage the look over an overbaked Instagram filter. Stopping the clip and starting recording again fixed that issue. When flying indoors in a room lit only with natural light coming in from the windows the footage has a grainy look, with a definite color shift toward the green end of the spectrum.

There's no stabilization gimbal, and whatever digital stabilization that's happening isn't up to the task. Video is shaky on the whole, and when the Cicada is moving up and down a bit there's an unnatural wavy, wobbly effect. It's not the same level as the digitally stabilized video captured by the Parrot Bebop, which is rock solid in comparison.

Stills are captured in JPG format at a 16-megapixel resolution. They're actually pretty decent. The image sensor—a 1/2.3-inch Sony chip according to Elanview—does a good job with mixed lighting when capturing photos, and most of the frame is sharp. The corners are very blurry, and purple fringing is an issue in high contrast areas at the periphery of the frame. It's probably not a bad idea to shoot a bit wider than you expect, then crop and adjust rotation using editing software, as it's tough to frame a really good shot with an unstable aerial platform.

I got about 15 minutes in the air on a single battery charge; two batteries are included. That is better than the Bebop, which only got me about 9 minutes with its two included batteries. When the battery gets low your phone will start vibrating and the screen will flash a warning. That's a good safety feature—but in one instance during my testing the vibration refused to stop, even after I powered the drone off and force quit the app. I had to reboot my phone to make it stop. That was just one bit of weirdness—the phone stopped vibrating as expected after landing and powering off the drone at other times.

Conclusions
At under $400, the Elanview Cicada certainly holds some appeal for pilots who want to get started with a backyard drone. But it's not stable in the air when flying on even a mildly windy day, and it's very easy to crash. Video quality is fairly poor due to shoddy digital stabilization, although stills are solid for this price range. For $100 more you can get a Parrot Bebop, which is a better choice if you're looking to get your feet wet with a starter drone. If you're a bit more ambitious, but not ready to drop more than $1,200 on our Editors' Choice DJI Phantom 3 Professional, consider instead the Phantom 3 Standard.