Gadgetory

- The new Mavic Air comes packed with features and modes like the ones you just saw. And you might have already seen some of them on the smaller DJI Spark and its predecessors, the Mavic Pro and the Pro Platinum. In fact, the $800 Mavic Air shares a lot of similarities with both of these drones, but this video is not really a side-by-side comparison. It's more about whether the Mavic Air is suitable for more serious photo and video work. Before we start flying, we'll have to spend some time talking about the size of this thing. Portability is what the Air is all about. It is considerably smaller than the Mavic Pro, but it's also smaller than the Spark, at least in its folded state. The fact that Spark couldn't fold made it a lot harder to carry around unless you used the provided case. Unlike the Pro and the Spark, the Air actually feels a lot sturdier. It feels like something I can fold, put it in my backpack, and not have to worry about it, especially when the camera and the gimbal are way more protected than they were on the Mavic Pro. Granted, when you include all the accessories and the batteries, the Spark is still a more portable setup as a whole, but you'll be sacrificing in image quality, flight time, and smoother footage. Speaking of the camera, it has a three-axis gimbal, compared to two axes you can find in the Spark, making the Air a lot better for videos. It also shoots 4K videos up to 30 frames per second and has a 12 megapixel still camera. You can also do slow motion up to 120 frames per second, and of course that one is 1080p. The biggest difference between the Mavic Pro and the Air is the fact that the Air shoots at 100 megabytes per second and the Pro shoots at 60 megabytes per second bit rate. Now without getting into explaining what bit rate is, it results in a lot crisper footage with a lot more data packed into it, so most people won't really notice a difference between the two, but it's good knowing that there is an image quality bump. One thing to consider, though, especially if you're into more serious commercial work, is that the sensor size on all these three drones is exactly the same. It's also smaller than the one that you get on the Phantom 4 so if you're into that you might want to skip the Mavic line entirely. Also, the Mavic Air has something that's called an APAS, or the Advanced Pilot Assistance System but we'll get into that later. Alright, enough about drone specs, let's see how this thing actually flies and what kind of footage you get out of it. You can fly the Air in three different modes. There's the wired connection, which is a big misnomer because there are no actual wires, it just means using the bundles remote. There's the wireless connection, meaning using only with your phone, and the third one is gestures. Now we won't focus on the last two because I think flying with your phone is a little weird and I will say the gestures, they work just as well as they did with the previous models. So the controller basically looks similar to the one that you would get with the Mavic Pro, but without the screen. Also, there are no thumb sticks attached to it. The thumb sticks are actually hidden in this tiny rubberized storage compartment within the remote, just under the arms that grab your phone. It's a great little design tweak, which makes it a lot easier to stow the RC in your bag. So the first time setting it up, I will say I had some issues, my phone was connecting to my home Wi-Fi, the link wasn't really working that well, and it just kinda made the initial pairing process a hassle. Once it was paired, each time I had to use the drone again, I would have to unpair it and pair it back again. It sorta started to get annoying but after I talked to DJI they just told me to wait for the green light on the remote and the green light on the drone and it'll just connect, and that did the trick for the most part. In some locations I will still get some errors regarding the compass but usually a quick reset will just fix the issue. Another major distinction between the Mavic Air and the Mavic Pro is that the Air uses Wi-Fi or enhanced Wi-Fi, and the Mavic Pro here uses radio frequency. Now that's a change that not a lot of people will welcome, but in my testing so far, it hasn't really been an issue except for the initial pairing. I will say you would lose the video link every now and then which can get a little nerve-racking even for a skilled pilot. The footage looks fine, it's a minor step up in quality from the Mavic Pro so if you recently got that one, don't feel bad. I have always found that the dynamic range can be an issue with smaller sensors, and the trend continues here. When you're shooting during the daylight, with lowest ISO, everything looks sharp and rich. But once you introduce a scene with high contrast such as sunrise, things kinda start falling apart. In the footage you're looking at now, the ISO was set higher than what I would normally do and you can definitely see it affecting the shadows. They look a little too noisy and the dark areas start to crush or lose all their detail, which can be kinda painful to edit, even when you're shooting in the CineLight color profile, which gives you more flexibility in post. I got similar results with the photos but with RAW files you still have more flexibility, and if you shoot bracketed you can always just do the exposure blending after the fact. I said that I won't talk a whole lot about different modes that you can shoot, but there is one mode that I'm completely obsessed about and you saw it at the beginning of the video. It's called Asteroid. The drone focuses on you, gives you a countdown, flies backwards and up into the air where it hovers for about a minute, and takes a spherical pan out shot. The app automatically stitches everything into one video. My only issues are the black bars you get towards the end of the clip, but they seem kinda unavoidable. There is one more standout feature in the Air that we haven't talked about yet and it's called the APAS, which is short for Advanced Pilot Assistance System. It basically enables the Air to 3D map the area around it and decide whether it should go around objects or fly over objects. Still that's not something that you should rely on. Although, it worked pretty well in our testings, you just have to make sure the feature is enabled and you're getting a good reading, which isn't always the case. Now since the Air is so small, a lot of people are concerned about how it's gonna perform in the wind. Unfortunately we haven't had a windy day in San Francisco so we weren't able to test that feature but I did get wind alert a couple of times when I really wasn't expecting it. Finally, that brings me to battery life. DJI markets this as a total of 21 minutes of flight time and sure, on a full charge you'll get that. But realistically, you're never on a full charge, by the time you set up the drone, take off, by the time you have to land it, you're looking at about 15 minutes. I do wish this was a little bit longer than that. Regardless, the Mavic Air really is the best of both worlds, those worlds being the Pro and the Spark. You get a slightly improved camera compared to the Pro, and a smaller body than the Pro and the Spark. Still, as I mentioned before, if you're looking into more commercial work, I'd strongly recommend you looking into the Phantom lineup. But if you're just a hobbyist or a freelancer looking to add another skill to your resume, the Air is the right drone for you.