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On Sep­tem­ber 25th, 2023, DJI intro­duced the newest mem­ber of its Mini series, the DJI Mini 4 Pro. Like DJI’s oth­er Mini mod­els, the Mini 4 Pro’s take­off weight falls below the impor­tant 250g thresh­old once again. It thus falls into the C0 drone cat­e­go­ry in the EU, which offers many advantages:

• It can be flown with­out a drone operator’s license.
• It can be oper­at­ed in the Open A1 cat­e­go­ry, so it may be flown in res­i­den­tial areas and close to people.
• It is extreme­ly portable. A com­plete set with drone, remote con­trol and 3 bat­ter­ies weighs just about 1kg.

Despite all this, how­ev­er, at least in the EU, a valid lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance and a reg­is­tra­tion of the pilot at the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty are also required for the oper­a­tion of the Mini 4 Pro. The Mini 4 Pro is the first DJI drone to be offi­cial­ly cer­ti­fied in the C0 drone cat­e­go­ry, its base is dec­o­rat­ed with an offi­cial C0 logo.

Exter­nal­ly, the Mini 4 Pro is only slight­ly dif­fer­ent from its pre­de­ces­sor, the Mini 3 Pro, which I have been using for 1 1/2 years. I already post­ed a few arti­cles about it on this web­site. Weight, flight time, sen­sor size, optics and flight char­ac­ter­is­tics are large­ly com­pa­ra­ble, but the Mini 4 Pro has some improve­ments that imme­di­ate­ly moti­vat­ed me to switch:

• It has omni­di­rec­tion­al obsta­cle detec­tion (the 3 Pro only can detect obsta­cles in front, behind and below it) which allows much more exten­sive auto­mat­ed move­ment modes and sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the risk of in-flight collisions.
• While the cam­era optics have remained the same, the image pro­cess­ing has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved.
• In video, the Mini 4 Pro now sup­ports 4k 60p even in Active Track and POI modes, as well as HLG and 10-bit D-Log M.
• In slow motion mode, 4k 100P is now also supported.
• The Mini 4Pro also sup­ports waypoints.
• In pho­to mode, the high-res­o­lu­tion 48-megapix­el mode is now imple­ment­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter, and HDR and con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing are also possible.
• The range of oper­a­tion and the qual­i­ty of the video trans­mis­sion to the remote con­trol (now in Full­HD 60P) have been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved.

All in all, this pret­ty much makes the Mini 4 Pro like a shrunk­en ver­sion of my DJI Air 3 with­out its 3x tele­pho­to optics.

The advan­tages have con­vinced me over­all, so I ordered the DJI Mini 4 Pro Fly More Com­bo with DJI RC 2 remote con­trol* already on the day of release at ama­zon. It already arrived the day before yes­ter­day. A first test flight yes­ter­day at our “home hill” was very promis­ing. Here as a small appe­tiz­er two pic­tures taken:

I will post a new arti­cle when I have more expe­ri­ence with the new drone. I also plan to do anoth­er com­par­i­son test of the image qual­i­ty of my drones with my full frame cam­era and also my new iPhone 15 Pro, which is sup­posed to have a com­pa­ra­ble sen­sor. I am very curi­ous about the result itself….

*= Affil­i­ate Link