It’s almost a year now since beda:photo retired our DJI Inspires and went over to using the DJI Mavic 3, and it has been a busy year for us, so the new kit has certainly been put through its paces. These are our ratings:

IQ (image quality)

At first we were a bit dubious about the slightly odd camera arrangements, two different lenses and very strangely shaped filters, but the system has proven to be very effective in a wide variety of situations. We always knew that the lack of interchangeable lenses would be annoying and the secondary lens is an attempt to compensate for the lack of any form of telephoto facility, and in all fairness it does a pretty good job.

 

In other words, the auxiliary lens is good enough for a lot of basic tasks, but it won’t produce many award-winning images.

The main lens, on the other hand, does produce beautifully crisp images with a very wide dynamic range and masses of detail. The raw images are a delight to work on, with astonishing amounts of flexibility in exposure, colour balance and  contrast. They do seem a bit soft to begin with, but with a bit of sharpening added, they take on a biting clarity which is easily comparable to the Minolta lenses used on Inspires. The camera is of course also a four thirds camera, so a big jump in quality over the previous generation of drone cameras is only to be expected.

Ease of use

When it comes to ease of use this little drone is in a class of its own. There is virtually no preparation required, just pull it out of the bag, unfold the legs and that’s it. Brilliant. Once in the air the Mavic is equally easy to handle, being very quick and responsive. The speed at which it moves over short distances takes some getting used to if you are accustomed to working with larger machines, even in cine mode, so a light touch is definitely needed. 

Battery life

Firstly, we were extremely relieved to discover that the initial massive charging time of anything up to 8 hours appears to be a once-only phenomenon, with a much more acceptable hour or so being the norm. We don’t normally run batteries down below 20%, so this can be even shorter. Flight times are still the longest we have worked with, usually around 40 minutes, which is particularly useful on large construction sites where one is often working at maximum range. All of this is good news, particularly as additional batteries are ferociously expensive to buy.

User/customer friendly(?)

A surprisingly important consideration when working in public places or busy construction sites is the reaction of workers, participants and passers by to the presence of a drone. Most people react far more favourably to the Mavic 3 than they ever did to an Inspire hovering a few yards away, which makes working significantly easier. If anything, the Mavic is so quiet and unobtrusive  that wedding guests and workers sometimes have an alarming tendency to walk right up to it to inspect it while hovering, which is not to be encouraged. Certainly, very few are intimidated by it.

Durability

Durability was the big issue as far as we were concerned with the Mavic 3. Our first reaction was that we had swapped some large, well made professional kit for a collection of cheap(er) plastic toys, but one year on it has to be said that the Mavic has performed faultlessly, with no technical issues at all, not even any replacement props, which is unheard of around here. They still sometimes come back covered with blood and the corpses of dead insects when flying in summer, but the usual nicks and scratches don’t seem to be occurring, so no complaints on that score. 

Another pleasant surprise recently was an uninterrupted morning’s work from the top of a 3 storey building flying in temperatures officially recorded at -7 degrees C at ground level. It would have been quite a bit colder at 400 feet. A lot of drones would have refused to fly in those temperatures, or at least issued dire warnings about battery temperatures and working life, but there was not a peep from the trusty Mavic. It just quietly did what it was asked to do without complaint. We are told that drone batteries don’t like it much below 15 degrees, but obviously no one has mentioned this to the Mavic 3, as the battery life and performance were completely normal.

Video

One of the great virtues of the Mavic 3, of course is its video capability. It has to said at this point that we have never had much call for the software bells and whistles which accompany each new drone from DJI, preferring to adopt a totally manual approach to our work. Having said that, however, functions like point of interest and follow me mode have definitely improved since the earlier DJI versions and the tendency for windspeed and direction to reduce efficiency appears to have been mostly eliminated.

From our point of view, the 4k video at 60fps is the big plus, providing greater levels of image quality and flexibility. Adjustable apertures have also rightly been deemed as essential for full control, so there is not much to complain about here. The 5.2K resolution is also great, but does require the fastest micro SD cards and increases processing and workflow times accordingly, so until clients start demanding it we will continue to be more than satisfied with the brilliant 4k footage this camera produces.

Conclusions

This drone doesn’t really have any vices. The DJI Fly app it uses, however, continues to plague the UK user with lots of irrelevant and intrusive ‘health and safety’ information when working in certain areas, even to the extent of inventing non-existent flight regulations and restrictions. And who cares about the latest restrictions about flying around the Emperor’s Palace in Beijing anyway? We certainly don’t.

Minor gripes notwithstanding, however, the Mavic 3 continues to be a great drone and is serving us well, so we would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for professional results from a drone that is remarkably easy to fly and good value for money.