Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This drone has two cameras”.
Let’S get this out of the way the mavic 3 cine is the best consumer drone. You can buy right now if you can afford to buy it at 4999. It is an expensive option with the combination of image, quality and size it’ll be hard to find anything better, but that doesn’t mean it’s a drone for everyone. This is the mavic 3 cine. The mavic 3 is essentially the same size as the mavic 2 pro.
If you look closely you’ll notice, it’s a little bit longer about the same height and just slightly heavier. Basically, it is the same footprint as before, and you won’t notice much of a difference carrying it in your bag. The wingspin and therefore the arms are a little bit longer, which adds more room for these slightly longer. Propellers too. The new camera module is big and it houses the main camera, the 24 millimeter lens, and also this 28 times hybrid zoom lens, which i’ll talk about later. The whole camera sticks out a little bit, which is both good and bad.
It’S bad because it leaves the camera exposed, so any potential crashes might be catastrophic. Luckily i didn’t find myself in that situation yet, but it’s good because this camera can also tilt upwards by quite a bit almost 30 degrees. Oh also, one neat little new feature is that the gimbal locks itself after flight, meaning it will not dangle in transport, and it makes it easier to put this uh muzzle on and i’m gon na call it a muzzle, because i don’t know it just feels. Like a muzzle anyways dji released two mavic 3s, the biggest difference between the regular mavic 3 and the senate is that the cine has one terabyte ssd and it can shoot 5.1 k. Prores 422 hq video up to 50 frames per second other than that.
Everything else is identical, we’ll dive into the camera quality real soon, but out of all those improvements over the mavic 2 pro the one i noticed the most was the battery life, it’s rated for 46 minutes and you don’t always get. You know 46 minutes of flight time, but compared to 31 minutes that the mavic 2 pro had it is very noticeable once you start flying around, i’m very used to trying to maximize battery life with each flight, but every time i glance over i’d be surprised. I still have around 70 75 battery left if you buy the 5 000 bundle which, by the way, is the only way you can buy this cine version, it’s not sold by itself. You get three batteries and plenty of flight time. Also, this might be minor to most, but it’s kind of a big deal for me.
The charging hub is now usb-c, meaning you can charge it basically on anything that supports usb-c charging just know that each one of those batteries takes a while to charge on a 65 watt charger so plan. Accordingly, it took me about an hour and 45 minutes to charge from 11 all the way up to 100 all right camera time. So we showed you all the specs before, but the most important one is the sensor size. The sensor is four thirds inch of a sensor, which is to say it is third of an inch larger than the mavic 2 pro.
It is also a 4×3 sensor, which means your photos are no longer in 3×2 aspect ratio. So, with increasing sensor size, you get better noise handling, richer detail, greater dynamic range, reduced, diffraction, better depth of field, which you don’t really notice on drones, effectively better image quality all around. So let’s look at some of the clips.
All these clips you’re looking at right now are shot anywhere from iso 800 to 6400, and they look extremely good to be fair. This whole scene has a good amount of light coming from the buildings and there’s some real life ray tracing happening with the reflections on the ground. But if you’re really looking for noise, then you should look at the dark blue sky here. This is at 200 percent. It’S definitely noisy, but it’s really not that bad.
Overall, everything from that night looks extremely good. Now, let’s take a look at the locked off shot for more direct iso comparison. Traditionally, drone cameras have a really steep decline in quality, as you keep adding more iso, and that’s the case here, but the downgrade isn’t as steep as before. 3200 is pushing it.
6400 is really pushing it and in all seriousness, you really won’t need to shoot at 6400. As often i tried doing it here, and it doesn’t look that good all the shots were shot in perez. But you are watching this on youtube’s player after it was exported to an h.264 format and then compressed again by youtube. So you’re not really going to be able to see every little detail here. I am including links in the description where you can download those files yourself and take a look. The built-in one terabyte ssd on the cinemodel has enough room for about two hours of 5.1k. 24 frames per second press footage. Unfortunately, the ssd is not user replaceable, but there is a micro sd slot here too, which you can use to store your h.264 and h.265 clips, but not prores, but the differences between the two codecs are really not that noticeable. So, looking at the clips in the premiere timeline, it’s actually really hard to notice much of a difference and just overall clarity and sharpness.
So for the sake of this demo, we’re going to start manipulating clips by lifting up the shadows, all the way up. Overall exposure, we’re going to add some saturation. I know this looks ugly, but looking back and forth between these two clips, i don’t really see much of a difference. So i’ve duplicated this clips and started adding more color to it, especially in the sky, adding some blue and you can sort of tell that the h.264 isn’t holding up as well as the prores in the top right corner. But those differences are so minor. If i were to do a blind test and try to guess which is which i really wouldn’t know the bottom line, is you don’t really notice any difference between the two coatings, but some of you who do drone work professionally and work for production houses or on Big productions, you often need to shoot and deliver files in prores. So now you have that option. I also think it’s just remarkable with living the age where you’re able to shoot pros videos on our phones and now the drones of this size, but most who aren’t using drones professionally, will still reap the benefits. Just from this larger sensor, higher bit rate and more frames in the standard, mavic 3 for far less money, this new camera can also shoot 4k up to 120 frames per second, i’m over the moon that we can now shoot 120 frames per second in 4k, but There is a little bit of propping and don’t get me wrong. The footage still looks really good. Just know that you’re not using the entire sensor when you’re in this mode and honestly, i can’t get enough of these silky smooth waves – it’s 60 frames per second – is enough for you.
Then there won’t be any cropping there when it comes to photos. The differences between the two drones are not as obvious at first. You might find it surprising that the mavic 3 dynamic range is rated for 12.8 stops compared to mavic’s two pros 14 stops of dynamic range, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. First, let’s take a look at that dynamic range that you get out of a single image with some very quick live room adjustments.
So here’s a more challenging sunset photo shooting straight into the sun. We kind of start by adjusting exposure, lifting shadows, dragging down the highlights, and you can get a really nice photo out of it. Lifting those shadows does reveal a lot of noise, but it’s really not that bad. You can clean that up manually, so yeah you can still get a good photo without it.
Looking too artificial, so looking at the side-by-side photos taken with the mavic 3 and the mavic 2 pro, you will start noticing the differences, but only if you look really closely. First, the mavic 3 is a little bit wider, because that 24 millimeter lens and the collar straight out of the camera are widely different here. So i’m just going to match the white balance values. First, both of these photos are shot at relatively high iso.
At 1600. Iso and if we zoom in at like 300 percent you’ll, see how much clearer the sky is in the background and also how much smaller the noise grains are too i’ll. Give you one more example here: both of these photos again were shot at 1600 iso and it just looks so much cleaner upon hearing the photo specs for this camera. I was a little bit worried that we’re not getting much of an improvement between the mavic, 3 mavic, 2 pro or even the air 2s.
It was still just 20 megapixels and it was rated for less dynamic range than before, but there’s a lot more detail available. Even if you have to go hunting to find it okay. Lastly, this brings me to the final thing i want to talk about, and that is the hybrid lens.
So, okay, i don’t love it. I understand why it exists, but i’m not convinced it’s entirely necessary. It’S fun sure, and sometimes you can find some cool things or just look around, but don’t expect miracles in terms of just pure image quality.
It’S a separate lens with a separate half inch cmos sensor sitting above the main camera. It is capable of 28 times zoom or 162 millimeters in focal length. You can shoot in progress with it, which is understandable, and you cannot shoot in d-log, which is a little bit less understandable and you’re locked in at 4k or 1080p at 30 frames per second. So when you enter the explore mode by tapping on these binoculars here, you enable digital zoo, okay at first that digital zoom is happening on the main lens, and i think that the 2x zoom looks really decent. Once you get the 7x zoom, that’s when the switch happens and the hybrid lens takes over and the 7x looks pretty good too see how much clearer the wells fargo sign is over here, but once you start going to 14 times or 28 times, it’s really not Something you’d just proudly post on your portfolio. Oh also, you cannot take raw photos while in the explore mode, just 12, megapixel jpegs and some of them look pretty good.
Okay. Few last quick things regarding photos. The minimal shutter speed is two seconds long.
Exposure drone photos are often hard to pull off, but i do wish that shutter speed was a little bit longer and, lastly, aperture is adjustable from f 2.8 all the way to f 11, which works for both photos and video. Of course. Alright, i threw a lot of information on you, so what i want to do next is go through my notes, app and just read some of the key takeaways that i’ve written down as i was reviewing this drone.
So video quality is incredible. 5.1 k is a decent resolution. Bump prores is really not for everyone. 4K60 without cropping is fantastic. 4K 120 even with cropping, is incredible. Photos on paper didn’t get much of a spec update, but that sensor does make for a big quality pump. Battery life is noticeably better vertical. Descent is much faster than before. Apas is also better and thus the return to home is improved, but 99 of the time i just fly back manually because it’s just faster, so dji’s light speed. Usb-C cable is actually amazing and sort of necessary when transferring these big files, the provided nd filters are okay.
I did notice some green color cast, especially with longer exposure photos, but also the mavic 3 feels a little bit unfinished. A lot of the features weren’t available. Active track wasn’t available, master shots were not available, panoramic photos which i use all the time they were not available during my testing. Hyperlapse is also not available. The wide-angle lens attachment apparently, is coming down the line, i’m very curious to see how that works also not available.
So all the core features that were available during my testing worked exceptionally well, but the list of things that is not ready is quite long. There’S the new remote controller in the sena bundle. It is the dji rc pro, which is very similar to the smart controller that came out a couple of years ago.
It has a great screen operating system built on top of os has decent but not exceptional battery life. I can get anywhere from three to six hours, depending mostly on the screen brightness, so their new obstacle avoidance sensor on this drone, they’re still omnidirectional and they’re. Finally, not as sensitive or as obnoxiously loud in the software as before also controller numerically tells you how close you are to objects, so that really helps when you’re flying near trees or buildings and stuff, like that, okay, ocusync, 3 plus is fantastic. I didn’t anticipate a big change here, but i really did notice the difference, not in range but overall steadiness of the connection, especially when going behind buildings or trees. It wasn’t as big of a problem as before and i would not lose signal whatsoever. Okay.
Last two things apas 5 and active track. I didn’t actually have time to test these because these features were not available during my testing period. Apas got enabled a few days ago, but active track is still not ready and it’s probably going to be ready in january. From what dji tells me, i still fly with sensors off, but when i did turn them on, they were far less aggressive and annoying than before.
I’M expecting some major improvement from dji in this category. Everyone is waiting for them to catch up with skyrio, and that is a very high bar, so we’re just gon na have to wait and see. So there are things i was hoping to see with this drone after years of rumors, one which was built in nds. It’S done here, that’s fine, i guess part of me was hoping for interchangeable lenses and i still think those would be far more useful than the hybrid lens, but i do agree with a lot of the choices that dji made here.
Increasing the sensor size. Instead of simply increasing resolution for one enabling 4k up to 120 frames per second and adding protest, video is going to be tempting for a lot of people. This drone is now very close to being an inspire 2, and it’s just this big. So do i recommend this drone? Yes, i set it on top.
It is the best drone you can find and if you can afford it and know what you’ll use it for just go for it, 5 000 is a lot of money and, if you add warranty on top of that – and if you live in a place where You got to pay high sales taxes that price can go up really quickly if you’re, a hobbyist or consumer, mostly posting on your social feeds. You can probably get away with an error: 2, a 2s or even a mini 2.. If you’re a bit more sensitive about image quality, do this professionally want the best of the best in a relatively small package and have enough computing power to edit these massive files and storage? You really can’t go wrong with the mavic 3 or the mavic 3 singing, but i still strongly recommend that you be honest with yourself and see if you’re actually going to benefit from those prores files or built-in storage, and you likely save yourself a lot of money. Okay, everyone, thank you so much for watching a lot of you send in questions, and i hope i answered most of them, but if you still have more questions, just drop them below and we’ll have a chat, cool .