Sometimes, DJI makes iterative updates to their next generation of drones, opting to make smaller improvements that, hopefull, add up to something meaningful. Other times, the changes are a lot more significant. The newest version of the outfit’s flagship consumer drone, the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, definitely feels like it falls in that latter category.
What’s so different about it? Well, it’s the first consumer drone to come with a triple-camera system that, the outfit claims, will unlock new shooting perspectives and allow for an overall better quality footage. That’s right, the Mavic 3 Classic gets one camera, the Mavic 3 gets two, and now, the Pro version gets a full hat trick of optical prowess, so your drone now has as many cameras as the back of your favorite smartphone. Nice.
The DJI Mavic 3 Pro comes with a 24mm equivalent wide-angle 43 CMOS Hasselblad camera, a 166mm equivalent telephoto camera, and a 70mm equivalent medium telephoto camera. This gives it the ability to switch among different focal lengths, all while incorporating different composition styles to give you plenty of creative room. The drone can shoot video in 5.1K at 50fps and DCI 4K at 120fps, allowing you to shoot sharper, smoother videos, while a shift in aperture also improve its low-light capabilities, so you get better recordings, regardless of ambient lighting. It also supports D-Log M format, which can deliver footage that reproduces up to a billion colors, along with D-Log and 10-bit ProRes. For photos, it can shoot 48MP images and up to 12MP in low-light situations.
The two tele cameras, of course, allow for greater versatility, with the 166mm tele camera able to shoot with 7x optical zoom, 28x hybrid optical and digital zoom, and 4K footage at 60fps; the 70mm tele camera, on the other hand, delivers 3X optical zoom, 4K video at 60 fps, and a 35-degree field of view. It comes with 43 minutes of flight time between charges, with eight wide-angle vision sensors and a high-performance vision computing engine allowing it to fly safely with minimal intervention from the pilot. It brings all the usual bells and whistles of DJI’s consumer drones, of course, including ActiveTrack 5.0, Spotlight, Point of Interest, and more.
The DJI Mavic 3 Pro comes with the same battery module as the non-Pro model, so that all-new triple camera setup is going to cost you a bit in the amount of juice it requires. Specifically, it cuts down the maximum flight time to 43 minutes, which is a full three minutes less compared to the standard model. Do note, by the way, that those flight times are at modest speeds with no obstacle avoidance engaged, so you’re likely going to get a lot less, especially if you’re shooting high-quality footage.
Alongside this release, DJI also announced the Cine version of the Mavic 3 Pro. Geared even more intently towards filmmaking, the drone has support for Apple ProRes encoding (422 HQ, 422, and 422 LT), along with a full TB of internal storage available to store all that space-hungry footage.
The DJI Mavic 3 Pro is available now, priced starting at $2,199.