DJI's drone "Mavic 3" stands out for its professional shooting performance and excellent obstacle avoidance

PHOTOGRAPH: DJI

DJI seems to have dropped the "Pro" from the name of the 3rd generation drone flagship model "Mavic", but don't get it wrong. With a new high-performance camera, two lenses, and full manual exposure control, the Mavic 3 is geared towards the "professional" videographer. It's fun to fly, but the $2,200 price reflects camera and lens performance, not flight performance. The drone "DJI Air 2S" is excellent with high-resolution camera and automatic shooting by AI If the main purpose of using a drone is to shoot high-quality photos and videos, the Mavic 3 is by far the best drone on the market. I would say the best. You may not need this much performance, but if you have the budget, it's a drone that's not only fun to use, but also shoots with excellent image quality.

Equipped with a higher image quality sensor

The Mavic 3 comes in two models. The standard model used for this review, and the model named "Mavic 3 Cine". The Mavic 3 Cine has a large internal storage capacity (the standard model SSD is 8GB, the Mavic 3 Cine is 1TB) and supports Apple's high-definition codec "Apple ProRes 422 HQ". For video shooting professionals, support for ProRes, a lossy video compression format, is important. The reason for increasing the capacity of the SSD is probably to cope with the file size of the video shot in ProRes. One of the most impressive improvements to the largest and most powerful model in DJI's Mavic line is the new camera sensor. The built-in 20-megapixel 4/3-inch CMOS sensor is the largest in the Mavic series (the number of pixels is the same as the 1-inch CMOS sensor of the Mavic 2 Pro, but the sensor itself is larger, so it has higher definition. there). This allows the Mavic 3 to shoot RAW format photos at 20 megapixels and video at 5.1K quality at 50 frames per second or 4K quality at 120 frames per second. The sensor size isn't the only improvement. The Mavic 3 is equipped with two types of lenses. The main lens is a 24mm single focus lens jointly developed with Hasselblad, a long-established camera manufacturer, and the aperture can be adjusted from f / 2.8 to f / 11. I shot with this lens 99% of the time in this review, and it feels like one of the best compact drone lenses I've ever used. The second is a 162mm telephoto lens with a 28x hybrid digital and optical zoom function. This is a 12-megapixel 1/2-inch CMOS sensor, so the image quality isn't very good. Manual control is not possible (aperture is fixed at f/4.4), and RAW images cannot be shot, so the scenes where it can be used are limited. When I actually tried it, images zoomed in at 8x or more were almost useless. It certainly won't work for professional video production. While useful in certain circumstances, it feels like DJI didn't put much effort into this lens. The images captured with the main lens are very good. The footage shot with the Mavic 3 is among the best I've had in 12 years of testing drones. The Mavic 3 is arguably the first drone in the Mavic series to replace the neglected (and, frankly, "abandoned") DJI Phantom 4 Pro+ after it was announced in 2017. The Phantom 5 probably won't make it to the world, but the Mavic 3 will take its place, so that shouldn't be a problem. It's not just the image quality that's great. The hardest thing about shooting with a drone, especially a fast-moving drone, is keeping it in focus. To speed up the Mavic 3's autofocus, DJI has introduced a technology called Vision Detect Autofocus (VDAF). The technology utilizes multiple vision sensors on the Mavic 3 for collision avoidance and speeds up focusing. I'm not sure exactly how much this helps speed things up, but focus is pretty fast. Focusing speed is important when shooting with a large aperture, so it's a nice feature.

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