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I’ve been using DJI drones for a few years now to “take my pho­tog­ra­phy to high­er alti­tudes”. How­ev­er, I hard­ly use the video modes of the drones (so far), I am still more inter­est­ed in the qual­i­ty of the still images. The last time I enjoyed using my DJI Air 3, which offered a slight tele­pho­to lens in addi­tion to the usu­al 24mm-equiv­a­lent wide-angle focal length. I have already test­ed the pho­to qual­i­ty of the Air 3 in detail here.

Photo quality

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I have the per­cep­tion that the cur­rent DJI drones are opti­mized pri­mar­i­ly for their video qual­i­ty. Each new gen­er­a­tion always offers new video fea­tures. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, the pho­to sec­tion, to which I also belong, is some­what neglected.

As a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I want the high­est pos­si­ble image res­o­lu­tion and a wide dynam­ic range. In addi­tion to the nat­u­ral­ly nec­es­sary good lens qual­i­ty, sen­sor res­o­lu­tion and size are par­tic­u­lar­ly important.

In smart­phones and cur­rent con­sumer drones, most­ly sen­sors in 1/1.3 inch for­mat have been used in the high­er-end mod­els for some time. The next larg­er 1-inch sen­sors were pre­vi­ous­ly reserved for bet­ter com­pact cam­eras such as the Sony RX100 series. The pre­de­ces­sor of the Air 3, the Air 2s, also had a 1-inch sen­sor, but unfor­tu­nate­ly with a res­o­lu­tion of only 20 megapix­els, which was no longer suf­fi­cient for me. DJI has now released a suc­ces­sor to the Air 3, the

DJI Air 3s

The new Air 3s now promis­es a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment for pho­tog­ra­phers. It again fea­tures a 1-inch sen­sor and has a res­o­lu­tion of 50 megapix­els - that’s more than that of my Canon EOS R5 Mark II.

What’s new?

In addi­tion to many oth­er improve­ments com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor, I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the qual­i­ty of the new 1 inch sen­sor (12.80 x 9.60mm). The Air 3 had a 1/1.3” sen­sor (9.98 x 7.50mm). The new sen­sor is there­fore 64% larg­er with almost the same res­o­lu­tion (50 vs 48 megapix­els), which promis­es bet­ter image qual­i­ty with less noise and a high­er dynam­ic range.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as has been the case since the Mini 3 Pro, it is still a quad-bay­er design, which reduces the col­or res­o­lu­tion and makes it more dif­fi­cult to edit the high-res­o­lu­tion photos.

In addi­tion, the Air 3s offers some oth­er wel­come improve­ments over its predecessor:

• It has improved all-round obsta­cle detec­tion. On the one hand, the pas­sive opti­cal sen­sors are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more light sen­si­tive com­pared to the ones of the Air 3, so that they still work even in low light. On the oth­er hand, the Air 3s now has an active obsta­cle detec­tion sys­tem (Lidar) at the front, which works even in com­plete darkness.

• The opti­cal obsta­cle detec­tion cam­eras can also be used to view the sur­round­ings dur­ing the flight. For exam­ple, it is pos­si­ble to fly back­wards under visu­al con­trol and record a video for­ward at the same time. For the first time, down­ward vision is now also supported.

• The intel­li­gent return to home in the event of sig­nal loss or man­u­al trig­ger­ing of the return-to-home func­tion has also been improved. The Air 3s now finds its way back to the start­ing point even if there was no ini­tial GPS lock. The pre­vi­ous DJI drones, on the oth­er hand, always flew back to the place where they had received the first GPS lock - this was not always the real start­ing point.

• A spe­cial high­light for us pho­tog­ra­phers is the new “Free panora­ma” func­tion. This allows you to select an area of any size for a panoram­ic image. The area is sim­ply defined by mark­ing the cor­ners of the desired panora­ma area. The Air 3s then auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lates the required num­ber of indi­vid­ual shots and takes them sub­se­quent­ly. This func­tion also offers anoth­er impor­tant improve­ment: the indi­vid­ual images can now at last be tak­en with the full sen­sor res­o­lu­tion (50 or 48 megapix­els) of both cam­eras. The pre­vi­ous panora­ma func­tions only sup­port­ed sin­gle images with a res­o­lu­tion of 12 megapixels.

• And anoth­er small improve­ment: the inter­nal mem­o­ry has been expand­ed to 42GB. This means you can take plen­ty of pho­tos and videos even with­out an SD card.

Legal matters

Like its pre­de­ces­sor, the new Air 3s is already cer­ti­fied in the EU in drone class C1 on deliv­ery. The cor­re­spond­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion is now print­ed direct­ly on the drone. The pre­de­ces­sor still had a stick­er on the under­side, which was easy to lose. The EU C1 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion allows you to fly in the Open A1 cat­e­go­ry. Open A1 is the cat­e­go­ry with the least restric­tions, in which pre­vi­ous­ly only drones weigh­ing less than 250 grams were allowed to fly. Fur­ther infor­ma­tion on drone cat­e­gories and clas­si­fi­ca­tions is in Ger­many avail­able direct­ly from the Ger­man Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (LBA).

To oper­ate the Air 3s, how­ev­er, you must have the EU drone pilot’s license (EU cer­tifi­cate of com­pe­tence) and be reg­is­tered at your local avi­a­tion author­ityas a drone pilot. Drone lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance is also required.

The DJI Air 3s can then also be flown close to peo­ple in the EU. The min­i­mum dis­tance of 150 meters from res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial areas no longer has to be observed either. How­ev­er, the Air 3s may not fly over unin­volved per­sons, unlike C0 drones weigh­ing less than 250 g.

Labeling obligation

The DJI Air 3s must be dou­ble labeled before its first use:

The UAS oper­a­tor ID received from the Ger­man Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Office (LBA) when reg­is­ter­ing as a UAS oper­a­tor must be leg­i­bly affixed to the out­side of the drone. It must also be entered in the Air 3’s firmware. The drone then per­ma­nent­ly trans­mits its ID dur­ing oper­a­tion. The oper­a­tor ID is entered in the DJI Fly app.

First experiences

I bought the Air 3s again in the Fly More Com­bo with 3 bat­ter­ies, bag, ND fil­ters and spare pro­pellers. As I already have the RC2 remote con­trol with built-in screen from the Mini 4 Pro, I chose the €200,- cheap­er ver­sion this time with the RC-N2 remote con­trol, which has a clamp for a cell phone and uses this as a dis­play. If nec­es­sary, I can use both remote con­trols with the Air 3s and the Mini 4 Pro.
*** Trans­lat­ed with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***

I have installed the mobile radio mod­ule offered by DJI in the Air 3 and now also in the Air 3s (DJI mobile radio don­gle 2*). This allows the drone to be con­trolled via the mobile net­work inde­pen­dent­ly of the direct radio recep­tion of the remote con­trol. How­ev­er, the mobile radio mod­ule in the Air 3s requires its own SIM data card; I use a sec­ond card from my Telekom con­tract for this purpose.

The sim­pler remote con­trol offers the advan­tage, that it is always logged into the mobile net­work via the con­nect­ed cell phone, which allows the drone to be con­trolled via the mobile net­work even if the O4 radio con­nec­tion los­es sig­nal. This works real­ly well. With the RC2 dis­play remote con­trol, you always have to pro­vide a mobile phone con­nec­tion by your­self, e.g. via a smart­phone hotspot.

Picture quality

Even the poten­tial of a 1-inch sen­sor is still miles away from the qual­i­ty of a 7 times larg­er sen­sor of a full-frame cam­era like my Canon EOS R5 Mark II, but at least an improve­ment over the Air 3 should be vis­i­ble, right?

For a first test, I took the Air 3s, like its pre­de­ces­sors before it, to our “local moun­tain”, the Desen­berg with its cas­tle ruins. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the weath­er was­n’t very good on this Novem­ber day, but it had to be enough for a first test. Inci­den­tal­ly, it was also very windy, but that did­n’t both­er the Air 3s much.

As usu­al, I took all the pic­tures in RAW for­mat and edit­ed them in Light­room to my lik­ing. In addi­tion to adjust­ing the basic set­tings, this also includ­ed col­or cor­rec­tions, HDR pro­cess­ing and AI denoising.

Here are some of the results from the maid­en flight:

All in all, con­sid­er­ing the poor weath­er con­di­tions, I am very pleased with the results. Admit­ted­ly, the above pic­tures of the Air 3s required exten­sive post-processing.

I nor­mal­ly use a full-frame sys­tem cam­era (cur­rent­ly Canon EOS R5 Mark II) with high-qual­i­ty lens­es for my pho­tog­ra­phy. Nat­u­ral­ly, the small sen­sor of the Air 3s can­not keep up with this. In par­tic­u­lar, the noise behav­ior and dynam­ic range of the drone are sig­nif­i­cant­ly worse.

But a lot can be com­pen­sat­ed for by com­put­ing pow­er in the sense of “com­pu­ta­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy” in post-pro­cess­ing with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent­ly exposed indi­vid­ual shots.

What mod­ern smart­phones cur­rent­ly offer in this area is very impres­sive. For a more in-depth intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject, I rec­om­mend the series of arti­cles on com­pu­ta­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy on dpRe­view.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the com­put­ing pow­er of the drones does not yet match that of cur­rent smart­phones, but a lot can be achieved in post-processing.

I often use expo­sure brack­et­ing with my drones to take 5 shots with dif­fer­ent expo­sures (DJI default: -1.3, -0.7, 0, +0.7, +1.3). The DJI Air 3s then auto­mat­i­cal­ly takes the 5 shots in quick succession.

I then merge them into an HDR image in Light­room Clas­sic (menu item Photo>Photo Merge>HDR…). This works with­out any prob­lems. Light­room reli­ably removes any arti­facts caused by move­ment between the indi­vid­ual shots. This pro­ce­dure improves both the noise lev­el and the dynam­ic range by almost 3 lev­els. Two of the images above were cre­at­ed from this expo­sure bracketing.

Image comparisons

Well, the pic­tures above look com­par­a­tive­ly good, but my ear­li­er pic­tures from the Air 3 weren’t real­ly bad either. The ques­tion now is whether the larg­er sen­sor com­pared to the Air 3 also deliv­ers bet­ter results in a direct comparison.

To inves­ti­gate this, I took test shots of the Air 3, the Air 3s, my iPhone 15 Pro and my cur­rent Canon EOS R5 Mark II out of the win­dow, as I did when I test­ed the DJI Air 3. All of the shots were tak­en in RAW for­mat in con­sis­tent light­ing con­di­tions with­in a few min­utes on a sun­ny late morn­ing in bright sunshine.

I took the pho­tos of the Air 3 and Air 3s with large­ly iden­ti­cal set­tings (1/2000s, f1.7 / f1.8, ISO 100). With the iPhone, I left it on auto­mat­ic expo­sure. The Canon R5 Mark II was equipped with the 24-70mm f/2.8L at 24mm and f/8 to achieve max­i­mum quality.

As the pic­tures tak­en for this test con­tained excep­tion­al­ly high con­trasts due to the harsh sun­light, they were also very suit­able for eval­u­at­ing the dynam­ic range and noise behav­ior in the shad­ow areas.

To do this, I first edit­ed the image from the DJI Air 3s accord­ing to my pref­er­ences. As all the cam­eras used a slight­ly dif­fer­ent white bal­ance, I used the eye­drop­per tool in Light­room to cal­i­brate it to the medi­um gray frame of the house in the mid­dle of the image. I also sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­ered the high­lights and increased the shad­ows because of the strong con­trasts. Here are my Light­room set­tings for the DJI Air 3s image:

I then edit­ed the oth­er shots in Light­room in the ref­er­ence view of the Devel­op mod­ule to achieve the clos­est pos­si­ble visu­al match.

I delib­er­ate­ly did not change the oth­er Light­room set­tings, in par­tic­u­lar sharp­en­ing or col­or cor­rec­tions. Here is the com­plete image pre­view (each reduced to 2048 pix­els page length):

Once again, the dif­fer­ences are bare­ly vis­i­ble in these down­scaled images. Com­pared to the Air 3, the field of view of the Air 3s is slight­ly wider. This is prob­a­bly due to the fact that the DNG file of the Air 3 already con­tains a lens pro­file that Light­room auto­mat­i­cal­ly applies and thus appar­ent­ly crops the image slight­ly. This pro­file is (still) miss­ing on the Air 3s.

But what does it look like with “pix­el peep­ing”, i.e. a clos­er look at the details?

Image details

Again, I enlarged the images to 400% in Light­room Clas­sic (ver­sion 14.0.1) and placed them next to each oth­er in the com­par­i­son view.

Here is a sec­tion from the cen­ter of the image. On the left is the image of the DJI Air 3s, on the right that of the Air 3:

I think you can clear­ly see here that the Air 3s offers bet­ter con­trasts, less noise and bet­ter col­or dynam­ics. The brick col­or of the Air 3s is also clos­er to the orig­i­nal. For bet­ter vis­i­bil­i­ty I show below an even fur­ther enlarged sec­tion (800%) of the above pictures:

Here you can also see, that the noise pat­tern of the Air 3s in the win­dow appears much more pleas­ant and “ana­log” than that of the Air 3.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pre­vi­ous DJI cam­eras with the 1/1.3” quad-bay­er sen­sor tend­ed to pro­duce arti­facts in the form of lines instead of homo­ge­neous noise. This is also clear­ly vis­i­ble in the image on the right. A major dis­ad­van­tage of these arti­facts is that they can hard­ly be removed with any of the com­mon noise reduc­tion methods.

These arti­facts are appar­ent­ly cre­at­ed dur­ing post-pro­cess­ing with­in the drone. The DJI DNG files do not real­ly con­tain pure raw sen­sor data, they have already been processed, in par­tic­u­lar the low-res­o­lu­tion col­or infor­ma­tion of the installed quad-bay­er sen­sor has been “dis­trib­uted” to the indi­vid­ual pix­els. The result is a so-called lin­ear DNG file. I have already described this prob­lem in more detail here.

This is pure­ly a soft­ware prob­lem; oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers are much bet­ter with de-bay­er­ing. My iPhone 15Pro, for exam­ple, also uses a small 1/1.3” sen­sor and does not have this prob­lem (it also takes sev­er­al shots with dif­fer­ent para­me­ters when the shut­ter is released and then com­bines them into a sin­gle image. This is “com­pu­ta­tion­al pho­tog­ra­phy” - but that’s going too far here)

Here are some more com­par­isons between Air 3s and Air 3 at 400% magnification:

The Air 3s shows a much more pleas­ant noise behav­ior in the images, sim­i­lar to film grain. This is an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly great advan­tage: as a result, the images can also be denoised much bet­ter with the cur­rent and extreme­ly effi­cient AI-based tools.

As an exam­ple, I have done this using the AI- based denois­ing inte­grat­ed in Light­room Clas­sic. You can find more infor­ma­tion on AI denois­ing in my arti­cle “Denois­ing with AI in Light­room Clas­sic”. Here are the set­tings I used for this:

And here are the cor­re­spond­ing results. On the left you can see the denoised image of the Air 3s, on the right that of the Air 3:

Die Ergeb­nisse der Air 3s sind nach der Light­room KI-ges­teuerten Rauschre­duzierung nochmals deut­lich bess­er als diejeni­gen der Air 3. 

Dynamic range

So far, the DJI Air 3s has already shown sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter results than the Air 3 in good light­ing con­di­tions. But what about the dynam­ic range? Below you can see a sec­tion of a poor­ly lit area, again for bet­ter com­par­i­son for Pix­el Peep­er at 400% magnification:

Here too, the Air 3s is clear­ly “one step ahead”. It shows sig­nif­i­cant­ly more details and dif­fer­en­ti­ates the col­ors much bet­ter than the Air 3, which large­ly drowns out the piles of wood in a uni­form gray. The dif­fer­ence is even more impres­sive in the ver­sion denoised with AI in Lightroom:

The AI works out even more details in the Air 3s and at the same time removes the noise very effec­tive­ly, which can be seen, for exam­ple, in the wood­en board on the left. On the Air 3, on the oth­er hand, the AI hard­ly brings any vis­i­ble improvements.

Post-pro­cess­ing the DNG files from the Air 3s is com­plex, but in the end what counts for me is the achiev­able final result in e.g. Adobe Light­room. And that’s where the Air 3s deliv­ers in my opin­ion the best drone pic­tures so far.

I also briefly com­pared the appar­ent­ly iden­ti­cal 70mm cam­eras of the Air 3s and the Air 3. But I’ll skip the pic­tures here. As expect­ed, there are no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between the two.

And in comparison with other cameras?

All in all, the Air 3s offers us pho­tog­ra­phers a clear­ly vis­i­ble improve­ment over its pre­de­ces­sor - at least with the 24mm equiv­a­lent cam­era. But how does it com­pare with the pret­ty good cam­era of the iPhone 15 Pro and, of course, espe­cial­ly with a full-frame camera?

Let’s start with the shad­ows. Below I show the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tions of the images from my iPhone 15Pro (left) and my Canon EOS R5 Mark II (right):

At first, the iPhone 15 Pro real­ly dis­ap­points in the shad­ow area. The image is denoised almost beyond any recog­ni­tion. Details are bare­ly vis­i­ble, the col­ors are fad­ed. I actu­al­ly like the shot of the Air 3 even bet­ter, and the Air 3s is sig­nif­i­cant­ly better.

The Canon EOS R5 Mark II is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent beast. It real­ly shows what a full-frame sys­tem cam­era can do. With very lit­tle noise, the col­ors are clear and the details are vis­i­ble in high resolution.

And here are some more exam­ples from oth­er image regions. On the left is the shot from the iPhone 15 Pro, on the right from my Canon EOS Mark II:

In the well-lit areas, the image qual­i­ty of the iPhone 15 Pro is on par with the 24mm equiv­a­lent cam­era of the DJI Air 3s - at least if you denoise the drone’s images with the Light­room AI (the iPhone 15 Pro itself already denois­es very well internally).

What can still be achieved with a full-frame cam­era, on the oth­er hand, is shown in the right-hand sec­tion of the Canon EOS R5 Mark II, which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly rich­er in detail. The good dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of the col­ors is par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive. This can be seen, for exam­ple, in the green of the cop­per pipes on the church tow­er. How­ev­er, this should be expect­ed from a cam­era that is with the lens used a good 6 times more expen­sive and 3 times heav­ier than the Air 3s.

Résumé

Over­all, I think the new DJI Air 3s is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment for pho­tog­ra­phers com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor - at least with the 24mm equiv­a­lent cam­era. In par­tic­u­lar, the dynam­ic range has been improved and the DNG files can now final­ly be processed prop­er­ly with the lat­est AI denois­ing programs.

The files from the DJI Air 3 and also the Mini 3 and 4 Pro always made it very dif­fi­cult for me in post-pro­cess­ing. What ulti­mate­ly counts for me is the achiev­able image qual­i­ty with good post-pro­cess­ing, and the new DJI Air 3s offers sig­nif­i­cant­ly more.

The panora­ma func­tion, which now allows freely selec­table panora­mas with both cam­eras and for the first time also in high res­o­lu­tion, is also an impor­tant and very wel­come improvement.

All in all, I am very pleased with the improved image qual­i­ty of the Air 3s, even if it does not come close to that of a full-frame cam­era. With good post-pro­cess­ing, you can now achieve sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter pho­to results than before.

So the Air 3s will now replace my Air 3. If any­one here is inter­est­ed in a well-main­tained DJI Air 3 Fly More Com­bo with DJI RC 2, please con­tact me 😉

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