Hey guys,
I’m very pleased I got into building and flying drones on your own, but I noticed there is a lot of clones in the market, so I want to know if there is a real difference between the original and the clone parts?
Also, if there is a trustable website that is selling drone parts in reasonable prices with international deliveries, most of my parts I ordered from Banggood and slowly I notice more parts of my drone are cloned and not original.
I know hobbyking but I dont know if its selling clones.(Amazon?Ebay?Aliexpress?)
Thanks.
Hello, In order to identify clones between the originals you have to first know what brand of components you are going to be using.From there you can then visit their website to see if the place is a licensed distributor as stated by the manufacturer. If other website sells the product and is not listed in the licensed manufacturer as stated in their website you can then email the manufacturer to see whether they are certified/accredited. Finally, is the price.You have to ask yourself whether it is too good to be true. Company like Realacc is a drone frame manufacturer which mainly clone frames from famous companies like rotor riot, karearea, xhover, transtec, geprc, etc. They have frames that are almost half the price of the og frames. For FC brands you can use betaflight configurator (flash firmware tab) to see all the list of firmware from each brand of FC. When you said is buying og parts is important? in some respect yes because it gives credit to the og designers for their hardwork. Other people may argue that og parts are expensive which is true but your are paying for quality.You maybe in a budget so you buy from companies like realacc but its totally your call to make the risk.
You can argue that buying clones is not good for the hobby for two reasons. 1- original designer who spent time and money making a good design looses out, and 2 - clones don’t have good quality control so they can cause alot of problems and headaches, especially if you are a beginner.
But on the other hand, decent clones for half the price allow more people to get into this hobby who maybe could not of (mainly younger people).
That said, I think if you can afford it, support the original designers as this is what helps the hobby forward as they make Innovative products. If all the original designers went bankrupt we would never see any innovation in this industry.
But as @MarkFPV you can do a quick search to find who is an official distributor of a product. But more importantly I think you must make sure you trust a shop before you buy from them, to make sure they will support you if something goes wrong.
Clone products usually fail more often as factories cut corners to save money, but I have also had clone items last longer then the original so it’s abit of a gamble. Most important is that the shop you buy from will support the things they sell when things go wrong, and for me that is more important. And this is why we offer 6 month warranty on everything we sell (except batteries).