so i've had this debate with a few guys at the field lately and i genuinely cant figure out where the consensus is anymore. been running analog for years, currently on a rush tank plus vtx with some hdzero goggles which i know is a weird combo but it works for me. one of the guys i fly with just switched everything to dji o3 and won't shut up about it and honestly the image quality is insane compared to what i'm used to.

but here's the thing ? i build all my own quads, running mostly tmotor f7 stacks and i like being able to swap stuff around freely. with dji you're kind of locked into their ecosystem for the air unit and it adds weight and cost per build. my current 5 inch freestyle builds come in around 295g without battery and i feel like slapping an o3 unit on there is going to push me over where i want to be.

also genuinely curious if anyone is running walksnail avatar and what they think. seemed promising when it came out but i dont hear as much about it anymore. is it still being actively developed or did dji just kind of stomp it out of the market

walksnail is still being developed, they pushed a firmware update not that long ago that improved latency noticeably. its in a weird spot though, the hardware is good and the image quality sits between analog and o3 in terms of crispness but the latency is better than o3 in some modes which matters for tight freestyle flying. fat shark buying into them definitely helped keep it alive.

analog isnt dead, theres still a ton of us running it especially for racing where the lower latency and not caring about wrecking a cheap vtx is a real consideration. but for freestyle and cinematic stuff the gap between analog and digital is so big now that its hard to justify analog for anything you want to actually film. for just ripping around a field for fun though? analog is totally fine, your eyes adapt and you stop noticing after like 5 minutes

the weight argument against o3 is kinda overstated imo. yeah it adds some but if youre flying freestyle you can tune around it. i put an o3 on a 5inch last year and yeah it bumped weight but the tune was fine after some adjustments in betaflight. the bigger issue for me was the price ? losing an air unit in a bad crash hurts a lot more than losing a rush tank.

still have one analog build purely because i dont care if it dies haha. send it into trees, dont even flinch. cant say that with an o3 unit on there