And I just love how much they think there toy is worth. Like it is the only thing on the market that carries a camera. For there price one can buy a lot of other proving aero camera platforms and have lots of change left over. Maybe I miss the point.
It's a small company which they started just to make this product which is why I think it's a bit expensive, but I agree on the price point. I can justify the prices to myself up to and including the one that costs $585. The board required to run the control system, do all of the mixing, handle the flight plan, and send/receive telemetry is $250. The two Xbee's are probably $75. That's $325 right there which is the majority of the cost. What they don't highlight enough is that the autopilot board uses the immensely powerful
Paparazzi project (which is what I use for my research) so you can have this thing flying fully autonomously via GPS, have it perform very complicated flight plans, do FPV flying like you said, have many of these flying cooperatively and fully autonomously at once, and lot's of other awesome stuff. The sky is the limit with this open-source software/hardware.
Not to mention you're paying for the R&D that went into this. I doubt that HobbyKing is spending time on almost 10 iterations of airfoils/hardware before they send it out or model and simulate the aircraft in XFLR5 and JSBSIM. Hell, this aircraft is a finalist in
DARPA's UAVForge competition.
All of that being said: no way in hell am I forking up $1800 for the high end one.