There are rumors and other DJI Phantom 4 reviews speculating that developers did this to keep the propellers out of the camera’s frame when accelerating. The DJI Phantom 4 is a drone that’s been making a lot of noise in the past few days, with a lot of people praising it as an experience that’s a cut above the rest. We’ve gotten a lot of mail asking for our two cents on this newest flying sensation, and after talking about the Toruk AP10 last month, we’re ready to give our verdict. As for commercial use, the quality of the still image isn’t quite there yet in my opinion. The inclusion of RAW format for a sensor of this size and quality doesn’t appear to mean much with the Phantom 4.
It’s available for preorder now on DJI’s website or at its flagship stores in Asia. DJI is clearly hoping this unit has enough new features to entice serious hobbyists and professional photographers and filmmakers away from the cheaper, more portable Mavic Pro. But it’s also clear DJI isn’t too worried about cannibalizing some of its own sales by introducing multiple units with overlapping appeal.
Today DJI released the dji drones Pro, an update to the Phantom 4 unit which came out just eight months ago, in March of this year. The Pro boasts a better camera, more advanced obstacle avoidance, greater battery life, and additional intelligent flight modes. It puts some space between the top of the Phantom line and the new Mavic Pro — a cheaper, smaller drone DJI released in October which, at least on paper, was just as powerful as its larger cousin. With consumer drone market booming and drones becoming more powerful, easier to use and equipped with rolling shutter cameras, there is an opportunity for professionals to use consumer drones for mapping work. We decided to put the latest top-end consumer drone DJI Phantom 4 to the test to find out the quality of captured data and its usability in professional land surveying projects.
Be it common land surveying, environmental monitoring, change detection, agriculture or construction, geospatial data acquisition and processing no longer rests on classical measuring and processing techniques. But, if you are flying below 200ft AGL on a cloudy day with your drone snapping away pictures on “Auto” your photos will likely be rendered useless due to motion blur. That’s because the auto setting of your drone camera software likely set the shutter speed too slow to allow enough light to come in . The dji drones Pro features 5 directions of obstacle avoidance along with all the intelligent autonomous flight modes below.
Multi-directional vision systems provide improved obstacle avoidance, speeds are higher and the battery lasts longer, but more than all this, the new drones have a far improved camera. Improved flight modes, better object detection for better collision avoidance, a higher speed and greater flight time and distance are all important as well. The Phantom 4 is, effectively, an iterative update over the best Phantom 3 models, but again, it is our opinion that the real world improvements exceed what the spec sheet tries to tell us.
DJI’s Phantom 4 is in fact a pretty amazing piece of technology and — for the moment — has supplanted the Phantom 3 Professional as the consumer camera drone to get if you’ve got the money. That said, the out-of-the-box flight experience isn’t all that different from the Phantom 3 — any of them. To be sure, the Phantom 4 does more, but if you are a beginner, there are less expensive options for learning to fly and capturing nice video and photos while you do it. The app is also how you set the Phantom 4 up to fly autonomously using DJI’s Intelligent Flight modes. First, if photo and video quality are your focus, the Phantom 4 Pro or Advanced are absolutely worth saving up for.
Jim Fisher is PCMag’s lead analyst for cameras, drones, and digital imaging. In over 10 years at PCMag, he’s reviewed hundreds of pieces of photo gear, running the gamut from instant cameras to high-end SLRs and lenses used for reportage and on the sidelines. It’s not just the increase in resolution—the Phantom 3 series captures images at 12MP—but also the larger image sensor. Whether you’re shooting in JPG or Raw format, the 20MP resolution and extra surface area deliver results that are palpably better, especially at higher ISO sensitivities.