Marques Brownlee, the YouTube reviewer known as MKBHD, has published a sponsored video on the Antigravity A1, the 8K 360 drone co-engineered by Insta360, and his verdict lands somewhere most sponsored content never goes: he spent most of the runtime selling the experience, then closed by naming two things he would change. Brownlee called the A1 “one of the most interesting hardware products I’ve seen in a while,” but flagged a faint stitch line on the horizon of the footage and a missing top strap on the goggles that limits how long you can comfortably fly.

That mix matters because Brownlee is not a drone specialist. He says so himself in the video, noting he has made only two or three drone videos and does not consider himself an expert. His reach is the story here. When a generalist tech channel with tens of millions of subscribers tells a mainstream audience that a 360 drone is “just straight-up fun,” that audience is not the FPV crowd that already knows what a 250-gram aircraft is. It is the much larger pool of people who have never flown anything.

The video is sponsored, disclosed up front and again at the end, where Brownlee runs the Antigravity Prime Day promotion and an affiliate offer. DroneXL has covered the A1 since the brand emerged from stealth, including a week of test flights in New York and a full pro-cinematographer review. Brownlee’s take adds a consumer-reach data point, not a technical one.

The A1 Replaces the Gimbal With Two Lenses and a 360 Sphere

The A1 has no conventional camera gimbal. Instead it carries one lens on top and one on the bottom, capturing a full 360-degree sphere at all times, then uses stitching to erase the drone and its propellers from the final footage. Brownlee framed the appeal in plain terms: you stop trying to nail the shot mid-flight and instead just get the aircraft into position, then reframe everything later in editing.

Brownlee noted the sensors and lenses are the same units found in the Insta360 X5, the company’s flagship 360 camera. Independent testing has confirmed the A1 uses dual 1/1.28-inch sensors recording 8K at 30 fps, with options for 5.2K at 60 fps and 4K at 100 fps. Gizmodo’s review measured the drone’s aperture at f/2.2, slightly wider than the X5’s f/2.0, and clocked the maximum video bitrate at 170 Mbps versus the X5’s 180.

He walked through the assist features: Sky Genie for automated orbits around a selected subject, and Deep Track, which he singled out as his favorite for car shoots. With Deep Track, the pilot flies a straight line and matches the vehicle’s speed as best they can, and the software keeps the subject framed without manual keyframing. Brownlee also showed the floating-orb “tiny planet” social shots, conceding most people would not find heavy use for them but calling them a fun option.

At 249 Grams the A1 Skips Registration in Most Countries

The A1 weighs 249 grams, one gram under the threshold that triggers registration requirements across the United States, Europe, and most other jurisdictions. Brownlee flagged the number directly, noting that anyone who has followed drones for a while recognizes it instantly. In the U.S., recreational pilots flying an aircraft under 250 grams do not need to register it with the FAA.

That weight figure carries a catch DroneXL has flagged before. The standard battery delivers what Brownlee called a 24-minute flight time, holding the aircraft at 249 grams. The extended High-Capacity Flight Battery pushes endurance to 39 minutes, but it also pushes the drone to 291 grams, above the registration line and into EU C1 territory. Buyers chasing the longer flight time give up the registration-free status that makes the standard configuration so accessible.

Brownlee listed the safety stack: obstacle avoidance, navigation assistance, auto landing gear, payload detection, and auto return-to-home, which he admitted using several times after flying farther than he intended. The payload detection system is worth pausing on. As DroneXL reported at the A1’s launch, the feature actively detects excess weight or unsafe modifications and forces an immediate landing, a deliberate response to the documented use of consumer drones to drop ordnance in Ukraine and other conflict zones. Antigravity built a hardware-level block. DJI, despite condemning military use of its products, has not.

The Goggles and Joystick Drive the Fun Brownlee Kept Returning To

Brownlee’s core pitch was experiential, not technical. He described a live feed from the A1 to the Vision Goggles that, unlike a normal forward-locked FPV setup, lets the pilot fly in one direction while freely turning their head to look anywhere. He compared the sensation to being a bird flying through a park, or a small jet. The goggles run a 90-degree field of view, which he called the widest in any flying FPV goggles, at 2560 by 2560 per eye, with one-tap defogging and a pass-through mode for when someone approaches mid-flight.

One detail caught his attention specifically: a customizable exterior screen on the front of the goggles that shows bystanders what the pilot is seeing. He noted it doubles as a status display for firmware updates. DroneXL reached a similar conclusion about how complete the system feels for a first-generation product, and tracked the same dual-screen design in our head-to-head against the DJI Avata 360.

The controller is a single joystick with a pistol grip rather than the two-stick setup most pilots know. Brownlee admitted initial skepticism, since dual-stick muscle memory is what produces the smooth sliding parallax shots creators recognize. His reasoning for coming around is the same logic that defines the whole product: because you are not performing camera moves while flying, you are only positioning the aircraft in space, so a point-and-fly joystick fits. An on-screen icon shows where the front of the drone points, and pulling the trigger flies it in that direction. Look away from the flight path and a picture-in-picture window keeps the forward view visible.

To make the learning-curve case, Brownlee handed the A1 to a colleague named Andrew for a day. Andrew’s first morning shot was a basic normal-mode clip; by early afternoon, using sport mode and the FPV controls, he was capturing far more dynamic footage. Brownlee’s claim is that someone with no prior experience can reach real confidence within about an hour. He also highlighted SkyPath, which lets one pilot record a flight route and then hand the goggles to a passenger, who experiences the same path live in 360. His pro tip: have first-timers sit down, because they will look down and see themselves hundreds of feet up.

Brownlee Named Two Flaws the Sponsorship Did Not Erase

The most useful part of a sponsored video is whatever survives the sponsorship, and Brownlee carved out room for two criticisms. First, the stitching that hides the drone leaves a faint smudge on the horizon line where the two lenses meet. He said it rarely intrudes but can show up if you shoot a lot of content right along the horizon. That observation tracks with independent testing. Gizmodo found that the wider gap between the A1’s top and bottom sensors, compared with a stick-mounted 360 camera, produced visible artifacts and occasional distortion on close objects.

Second, the goggles need an additional top strap. Brownlee pointed out that with displays mounted up front, the weight pulls forward, and a top strap would distribute it more evenly and let pilots fly across multiple batteries without discomfort. He also gave a practical heads-up for public flying: with the goggles lit up and the exterior screen glowing, expect to explain yourself to passersby. He mentioned Antigravity is working on goggle-less flight using a ring remote and gesture controls, which he has not yet seen in action.

The Prime Day Numbers and What They Actually Mean

Brownlee tied the video to Antigravity’s Prime Day sale, citing up to 25% off the A1 and around $480 in savings, plus 20% off accessories and a free battery and lens kit for early buyers through his link. The discount is real and confirmed by Antigravity’s own announcement: up to 25% off across Amazon and the Antigravity store, running June 23 through 26.

The figures need a clarifying note for buyers comparing what they see. The A1 Standard Bundle, which includes the drone, Vision Goggles, and Grip controller, lists at $1,599. DroneXL’s own Prime Day deal coverage tracked the Standard Bundle selling at $1,279, a $320 cut and its lowest price yet, with the Infinity Bundle at $1,599 off a $1,999 list. The “up to 25%” headline applies at the deepest bundle tiers; the dollar figure a buyer actually sees depends entirely on which bundle they pick, which is why Brownlee’s roughly $480 number does not line up with the entry price. Read the live product card before checking out.

The A1 has also improved since launch. A late-April firmware update added full omnidirectional obstacle avoidance with active bypass, voice control for hands-free operation in the goggles, a smarter Auto Edit algorithm, and a third-person Virtual Cockpit view. The obstacle-avoidance addition closed a genuine safety gap in the original hardware.

DroneXL’s Take

Here is what Antigravity actually bought with this sponsorship, and it is not a review. Brownlee said so himself, twice. What Antigravity bought is reach into an audience that DJI has spent a decade owning by default: the normal person who wants a flying camera and has never touched a controller. That is the real product positioning, and it is smarter than the spec sheet suggests.

We have made this point since the A1 launched, and Brownlee’s video is the consumer-facing proof of it. GoPro tried to beat DJI and failed. So did Sony, Skydio, and Parrot. They all tried to out-DJI DJI on conventional camera drones and lost. Antigravity did the one thing that works against an entrenched incumbent: it refused to play on the incumbent’s field. It built a category DJI had not touched, shipped it before DJI could counter with the Avata 360, and made the pitch about feeling rather than pixels. DJI has since answered with a drone that undercuts the A1 by a wide margin on price, yet the A1 keeps selling on an experience the spec sheet does not capture. When a generalist reviewer with that kind of audience spends ten minutes saying “this is just fun,” the category-creation strategy is working exactly as designed.

Now the honest part, because we are not in the business of laundering ad reads. The A1 is still a Chinese-manufactured drone. Antigravity is an Insta360 brand, and Insta360 is headquartered in Shenzhen, the same city as DJI. Anyone buying the A1 as some kind of escape from Chinese drone hardware is buying a story, not a fact. What the A1 genuinely offers is something different: a sub-250-gram aircraft that ducks registration in its standard configuration, a hardware payload block that DJI still refuses to implement, and FCC certification secured before the Covered List designation took effect. Those are real, and they matter more than the country-of-origin theater.

The two flaws Brownlee named are the ones that survive contact with daily use, and we will repeat them because they are correct. The horizon stitch line is the cost of erasing the drone from a 360 sphere with two widely spaced lenses, and it shows up exactly where he says. The goggles do need a top strap. These are first-generation problems, and a first-generation product that ships with two nameable flaws and a dozen things that work is a rarity in this industry. The thing to watch is the goggle-less ring remote Antigravity is developing. If that ships and works, the A1 sheds the one piece of friction keeping it from the truly mainstream buyer, and the “anyone can fly it” pitch stops needing an asterisk.

Sources: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) on YouTube, Antigravity via PR Newswire, Gizmodo, Insta360.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.