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The new DJI Mini 5 Pro is here, and just a few days after its launch (as usu­al in the Fly More Com­bo*), it flew into my hands 😉. I’ve been hap­pi­ly using its pre­de­ces­sor, the Mini 4 Pro, along­side my DJI Air 3s for a good two years now, as it’s much less con­spic­u­ous and much eas­i­er to transport.

Weigh­ing less than 250 grams, the new Mini 5 Pro remains in the light­est drone class, C0. This places it in EU cat­e­go­ry A1, the least restrict­ed flight class.

As I have men­tioned sev­er­al times before, my main focus con­tin­ues to be on pho­tog­ra­phy, and in this review I would like to exam­ine the Mini 5 Pro more close­ly from this perspective.

But first, the ques­tion aris­es: What has changed com­pared to the pop­u­lar Mini 4 Pro, which was intro­duced almost exact­ly two years ago (my detailed review of the Mini 4 Pro can be found here)?

Changes compared to the Mini 4 Pro

Better camera, larger sensor

The most strik­ing inno­va­tion is the 1-inch cam­era sen­sor with a res­o­lu­tion of 50 megapix­els, used for the first time in a drone weigh­ing less than 250g. By com­par­i­son, the Mini 4 Pro has a small­er 1/1.3-inch sen­sor with 48 megapix­els. Accord­ing to DJI, the larg­er sen­sor in the Mini 5 Pro is designed to deliv­er vis­i­bly bet­ter image qual­i­ty and a wider dynam­ic range, espe­cial­ly in low light and high con­trast conditions.

It also excels at video record­ing: 4K videos are now pos­si­ble at up to 120 frames per sec­ond, and Full HD even at 240 fps—perfect for smooth slow motion.

Anoth­er new fea­ture is the cam­er­a’s 2x tele­pho­to func­tion, which DJI calls “Med-Tele Mode.” Sim­i­lar to the cur­rent Apple iPhones (where it is called “Fusion Cam­era”), this uses only the cen­tral quar­ter of the image sensor.

It is there­fore mere­ly a sen­sor crop to the mid­dle 12 megapix­els. In video, which uses only 8 megapix­els even in 4K res­o­lu­tion, this results in per­fect­ly usable image qual­i­ty that is also sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous 2x zoom of the Mini 4 Pro. How­ev­er, this is of no ben­e­fit in pho­tog­ra­phy, which is my pri­ma­ry inter­est and the focus of this arti­cle. The 2x crop can just as eas­i­ly be done in post-processing.

New panorama mode

The new Mini 5 Pro final­ly offers the fan­tas­tic new free panora­ma mode that was intro­duced with the Air 3s. This allows you to select an area of any size for a panoram­ic image. The area is sim­ply defined by mark­ing two cor­ners of the desired panora­ma area. The Mini 5 Pro then auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lates the num­ber of indi­vid­ual shots required and takes them automatically.

This fea­ture also offers sev­er­al oth­er impor­tant improve­ments: indi­vid­ual images (either JPG or DNG) can now final­ly be cap­tured at the cam­er­a’s full sen­sor res­o­lu­tion (50 megapix­els). Pre­vi­ous panora­ma fea­tures only sup­port­ed indi­vid­ual images with a res­o­lu­tion of 12 megapixels.

In addi­tion, the Mini 5 Pro can now also take 3 HDR sin­gle shots in free panora­ma mode (and even 5 sin­gle shots in 12 MP res­o­lu­tion). This allows you to merge an HDR panora­ma in Light­room Clas­sic, for exam­ple, which sig­nif­i­cant­ly improves the image quality.

How­ev­er, the amount of data cre­at­ed in this way is enor­mous. Even my pow­er­ful 16-core Thread­rip­per work­sta­tion with an RTX 2080TI takes a very long time to stitch these panora­mas together—but the result is breath­tak­ing. The res­o­lu­tion is suf­fi­cient for prints large enough to cov­er entire house walls 😉.

More stable, safer, longer in the air

The flight time increas­es slight­ly to up to 36 min­utes – two min­utes more than the Mini 4 Pro. That may not sound like much, but it is notice­able in prac­tice, espe­cial­ly in windy con­di­tions. Speak­ing of wind: accord­ing to the tech­ni­cal data, the Mini 5 Pro is now wind-sta­ble up to 12 m/s, mak­ing it around 10% more robust than its predecessor.

An improved obsta­cle pro­tec­tion sys­tem is also new. In addi­tion to the 360° sen­sors all around, the Mini 5 Pro now also uses Lidar (Light Detect­ing and Rang­ing) tech­nol­o­gy to detect objects even more precisely—even at dusk or in low light. The IR light from the active Lidar sen­sor, which is invis­i­ble to our eyes, can be clear­ly seen above the lens in this image:

More memory and new improved system

Anoth­er plus point is the inter­nal mem­o­ry: it now comes with 42 GB built in, so even if you for­get your mem­o­ry card in your card read­er at home, you can still take a lot of pic­tures. The wire­less con­nec­tion runs via the new O4+ sys­tem, which is designed to offer even more sta­ble image trans­mis­sion with less interference.

Gimbal rotation

The gim­bal (cam­era mount) now has a larg­er rota­tion range. This allows for even more flex­i­ble film­ing. The Mini 4 Pro was already able to rotate the cam­era 90° for por­trait shots. The Mini 5 Pro can now rotate the cam­era con­tin­u­ous­ly by up to 225°, allow­ing you to shoot videos with a rotat­ing hori­zon, sim­i­lar to the much larg­er Mav­ic 4 Pro.

Improved two-way charging station

A very wel­come improve­ment that I recent­ly dis­cov­ered myself: the DJI Mini 5 Pro two-way charg­ing sta­tion includ­ed in the Fly More Com­bo has not only been giv­en a new col­or. Unlike its pre­de­ces­sor, it now charges at up to 45 watts with com­pat­i­ble PD pow­er adapters - allow­ing two bat­ter­ies to be charged SIMULTANEOUSLY.PD-Netzteilen mit bis zu 45 Watt - dann wer­den zwei Akkus GLEICHZEITIG geladen.

I fre­quent­ly use this fea­ture when trav­el­ing and recharge drained bat­ter­ies with a PD-com­pat­i­ble pow­er bank while using fresh­ly charged ones. This allows you to fly the Mini5 Pro almost con­tin­u­ous­ly for as long as the pow­er bank allows.

Improved return to home function

As with the DJI Air 3s, the Mini 5 Pro’s “return to home” behav­ior has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved. All pre­vi­ous DJI drones auto­mat­i­cal­ly returned to the posi­tion where they had received their first GPS fix when the RTH (return to home) func­tion was ini­ti­at­ed, either inten­tion­al­ly or due to sig­nal loss. This fix was accom­pa­nied by an acoustic sig­nal from the remote con­trol with the mes­sage “Home­point updated.”

How­ev­er, this was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the actu­al start­ing point, espe­cial­ly when tak­ing off from loca­tions with poor GPS cov­er­age. Now, the Mini 5 Pro also remem­bers the flight path from take­off to the first GPS fix and then flies this route exact­ly in reverse when return­ing. This even works indoors through open win­dows or gates.

Additional features

Anoth­er change, at least in the Fly More Com­bo: it now comes in a new, sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er bag. Whether this is seen as an advan­tage or a dis­ad­van­tage is a mat­ter of opin­ion. The bag that came with the pre­vi­ous mod­el was con­ve­nient­ly small for trans­port. How­ev­er, it only just fit the essen­tial com­po­nents, with no room for addi­tion­al accessories.

That’s dif­fer­ent with the new larg­er bag. For exam­ple, I can also use it to car­ry my Rokid Air video glass­es*, which I real­ly like to use as an addi­tion­al dis­play with the DJI RC 2 remote con­troller. The glass­es can be eas­i­ly con­nect­ed to the RC 2 using the USB-C cable sup­plied and then dis­play a huge vir­tu­al image of the RC 2 screen.

The pro­pellers have under­gone anoth­er very wel­come change. Thanks to a quick-release sys­tem, like on all larg­er DJI drones, they can now final­ly be changed with­out tools. Fid­dling around with a mini screw­driv­er and tiny screws, as was the case with the mini pre­de­ces­sors, is final­ly a thing of the past. Six spare pro­pellers are includ­ed with the com­bo again.

A box con­tain­ing three ND fil­ters (ND 8, ND 32, and ND 128) is also includ­ed in the scope of delivery.

Legal information for drones weighing less than 250g

Drones weigh­ing less than 250g have the great advan­tage of being sub­ject to the fewest flight restric­tions. The exten­sive drone reg­u­la­tions sound con­fus­ing: Like its pre­de­ces­sor, the Mini 5 Pro is in Europe clas­si­fied in CE class C0 and can there­fore be flown in cat­e­go­ry “A1.”

In prac­ti­cal terms, this means that they can be flown with­out an EU remote pilot cer­tifi­cate, i.e., with­out a cor­re­spond­ing exam­i­na­tion (cat­e­go­ry A1/A3) and with­out the oth­er­wise pre­scribed min­i­mum dis­tances to res­i­den­tial areas or peo­ple (except for over­flights). Nev­er­the­less, reg­is­tra­tion of the oper­a­tor (in Ger­many with the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (LBA)) and a drone lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance pol­i­cy are of course still required.

But there are also restric­tions: In gen­er­al, Class C0 drones may not exceed a max­i­mum speed of 19 m/s (which is still equiv­a­lent to 68 km/h!). And there is a flight alti­tude lim­it of 120 m mea­sured above the alti­tude of the take-off point. As a rule, all drones of all class­es must always be flown with­in visu­al line of sight from the remote pilot.

Dji Mini 5 Pro in photography

As a pas­sion­ate pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I exclu­sive­ly use the RAW/DNG for­mat in the high­est avail­able sen­sor res­o­lu­tion of 50 megapix­els when tak­ing pho­tos with the Mini 5 Pro. I also edit my images almost exclu­sive­ly with Adobe Light­room Clas­sic, so my com­ments below refer explic­it­ly to this workflow.

Besides the oth­er improve­ments com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor men­tioned above, I was there­fore par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the qual­i­ty of the new 1-inch sen­sor (12.80 x 9.60 mm) in the Mini 5 Pro. The Mini 4 Pro still had a 1/1.3-inch sen­sor (9.98 x 7.50 mm). 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.

Camera design

The sen­sor and optics are like­ly to be large­ly iden­ti­cal to those of the DJI Air 3s, which I also use with plea­sure. Many of the drone shots in my Trom­sø gallery were tak­en with this mod­el. I have already writ­ten a detailed test report on this as well: DJI Air 3s – Pho­to Qual­i­ty. Much of what is writ­ten there should there­fore also apply to the DJI Mini 5 Pro.

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, RAW files from dig­i­tal cam­eras do not only con­tain the actu­al, unprocessed sen­sor data. In fact, the data is always pre-processed in any cam­era – to a greater or less­er extent depend­ing on the mod­el. Arti­facts that arise dur­ing this pro­cess­ing are very dif­fi­cult to remove lat­er, even with the best RAW devel­op­ment software.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, how­ev­er, the sen­sor in the Mini 5 Pro, once again, as has been the case since the Mini 3 Pro, is a Quad Bay­er design, which sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces col­or res­o­lu­tion and thus makes post-pro­cess­ing of high-res­o­lu­tion pho­tos more difficult.

DNG format

If you take a clos­er look at the DNG files from the new­er DJI drones (e.g., with EXIFTOOL), you will see , that they are sup­plied in the stan­dard Bay­er for­mat. Obvi­ous­ly, a Quad-Bay­er -> Bay­er con­ver­sion has already been per­formed insid­er the drone, which inevitably makes orig­i­nal sen­sor infor­ma­tion inac­ces­si­ble for lat­er, bet­ter demo­saic­ing algo­rithms. Despite the many advan­tages of Quad-Bay­er for video, a stan­dard Bay­er design, which is used by almost all pro­fes­sion­al cam­era sen­sors, is sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter for photography.

But enough the­o­ry, here are some prac­ti­cal results from my first test flight.

First flight

As with many of my pre­vi­ous drone tests, the des­ti­na­tion for my first test flight with the Mini 5 Pro was once again our local moun­tain, the near­by Desen­berg. As always, I took all the pic­tures as 50-megapix­el RAW DNG files and then edit­ed them in my usu­al work­flow in Adobe Light­room Clas­sic (ver­sion 14.5.1).

Exposure bracketing

For years, I have been using my drones almost exclu­sive­ly to take AEB expo­sure series. This allows me to increase the dynam­ic range of the small drone sen­sors, which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced com­pared to larg­er sys­tem cam­eras, by post-pro­cess­ing the indi­vid­u­al­ly exposed images using HDR. This time, I again took 5 indi­vid­ual shots at ISO 100 between -1 1/3 and + 1 1/3 EV. To ensure that I have enough stor­age capac­i­ty in all sit­u­a­tions, I cur­rent­ly only use San­Disk Extreme microS­DXC UHS-I mem­o­ry cards* with a capac­i­ty of 512 GB in my DJI drones. I haven’t had any prob­lems with them so far.

Suggestions for improvement

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, like its pre­de­ces­sors, the DJI Mini 5 Pro only sup­ports AEB expo­sure brack­et­ing with a max­i­mum of 5 (at 50 megapix­els) fixed steps, each with 2/3 f-stops. I would pre­fer to be able to adjust the step size or at least increased indi­vid­ual steps of one f-stop.

Sample images

The flight took place on a late Octo­ber after­noon at an out­side tem­per­a­ture of around 5°C dur­ing sun­set. Here is a first shot of the sun­lit south-west side of the Desenberg:

The image above is a sin­gle shot tak­en with auto­mat­ic expo­sure at ISO 100 with­out expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion. I edit­ed it in Light­room using the fol­low­ing settings:

As expect­ed, there are some noise arti­facts in the shad­ows, but these are only notice­able when great­ly enlarged. The extreme cor­ners are slight­ly blurred, but this is not unusu­al for a wide-angle shot of 24mm in full for­mat. All in all, I think the image qual­i­ty is already quite good. How­ev­er, the light­ing con­di­tions here were also uncomplicated.

Example #2

Here is anoth­er exam­ple of a slight­ly more com­plex light­ing sit­u­a­tion: a back­lit shot. In order to cap­ture the high dynam­ic range of the scene, I used the function 

• Photo | Photo merge | HDR

in Light­room Clas­sic to merge the five indi­vid­ual shots from the +/- 1.33 brack­et­ing series into an HDR image:

I then processed the new HDR DNG file in Light­room Clas­sic using the fol­low­ing settings:

Example #3

Here is anoth­er exam­ple, this time the shots were tak­en with even 10 indi­vid­ual expo­sures with expo­sure times rang­ing from 1/90 to 1/5000:

I am also very sat­is­fied with this result. HDR pro­cess­ing is very help­ful in sit­u­a­tions like this, as the com­par­i­son below shows:

On the left is an edit­ed sin­gle shot (ISO 100, 1/500), on the right is the HDR image cre­at­ed from the brack­et­ed shots in Light­room. The dif­fer­ences in the high­lights on the left are par­tic­u­lar­ly notice­able; here is a 100% crop:

In the sin­gle shot on the left, the bright areas in the sky are com­plete­ly blown out, while the DNG file still reveals cloud details. But the shad­ow areas also ben­e­fit from HDR pro­cess­ing, with sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced noise:

The strong col­or noise is par­tic­u­lar­ly notice­able on the right edge of the frame. In my opin­ion, the results from the new small drone are quite usable. How­ev­er, com­pared to shots tak­en with a full-frame cam­era, it takes sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effort to achieve good results. At first glance, the qual­i­ty is, as expect­ed, quite com­pa­ra­ble to that of the larg­er DJI Air 3s and feels slight­ly bet­ter than that of its pre­de­ces­sor. This was to be expect­ed, as the pre­vi­ous­ly new 1-inch sen­sor of the Air 3s had already shown slight­ly bet­ter results com­pared to the Mini 4 Pro. For more on this, please refer to my test of the Air 3s pho­to qual­i­ty.

Final­ly, here are a few more pho­tos from the maid­en flight:

Resumée

In my opin­ion, the new DJI Mini 5 Pro offers wel­come improve­ments for us pho­tog­ra­phers com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor. The image qual­i­ty has been fur­ther improved. I have already used the new free panora­ma mode very often with the Air 3s. I am very hap­py to now have it with me all the time on its lit­tle sis­ter, too.

Oth­er improve­ments are also wel­come, such as bet­ter obsta­cle detec­tion thanks to Lidar, improved RTH han­dling, and slight­ly longer flight times.

All in all, I am pleased with the fur­ther improve­ment in image qual­i­ty, even though it still does not match that of my Canon EOS R5 Mark II. How­ev­er, with good post-pro­cess­ing, it is still pos­si­ble to achieve appeal­ing results.

Is it worth switching from the Mini 3 or 4 Pro?

This is a dif­fi­cult indi­vid­ual deci­sion. Over­all, the improve­ments are once again more “evo­lu­tion” than “rev­o­lu­tion.” The Mini 3 and 4 Pro were already very good. Every­one must there­fore decide for him­self whether the addi­tion­al val­ue pro­vid­ed by the improve­ments described jus­ti­fies the extra expense. This ini­tial test report doc­u­ments how I decided.

By the way, if any­one is inter­est­ed, I have a Mini 4 Pro in the Fly More Com­bo in very good con­di­tion with an includ­ed ND fil­ter set for sale 😉.

PS: By the way, in the mean­time, I have also com­plet­ed a direct com­par­i­son test between the DJI Mini 4 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro. The results can be found here on my web­site in the arti­cle: DJI Mini 5 Pro vs Mini 4 Pro - com­par­i­son of pho­to qual­i­ty.

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