so anyway i ended up getting one of those cheaper hubsan things because i didnt want to spend too much starting out and i kind of wish i had just gone with something better from the start. the thing drifts all over the place even indoors and i keep having to correct it constantly. wind outside is basically a dealbreaker, anything more than like a light breeze and its a struggle. image quality is whatever i guess i wasnt expecting much. just wondering if this is normal for entry level stuff or if i got a particularly bad one. also the range on the controller feels super short, i got maybe 50 meters before it started getting sketchy. should i just sell it and get something real or is there a way to make these cheaper drones work better

yeah thats pretty much what you get in that price range unfortunately. no optical flow sensor, basic barometer holding, and a cheap ESC stack. the drift is just a feature at that point lol. if youre even slightly serious about this hobby id say cut your losses and put that money toward a mini 2 or even a used mini 3. you'll learn faster on something that actually behaves predictably instead of fighting bad flight controllers the whole time. the cheap ones are fine for like flying in a living room but outdoors theyre genuinely frustrating

i had almost the exact same thing happen to me, bought some random thing off amazon first and spent more time chasing it across fields than actually flying. the drifting indoors thing is because theres no downward vision system, its only using the barometer to hold altitude and thats just not that precise especially if theres any airflow from like a ceiling fan or AC. i dont think theres really a fix for it, its just a hardware limitation. i sold mine for like 40 bucks and put it toward a refurbished mini 2 and honestly it felt like a completely different hobby