DJI Mini 5 Pro - Photo quality
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I switched from the DJI Mavic 3 Classic to the Mini 5 Pro for many reasons and naturally expected the image quality to be noticeably inferior to the Mavic 3. The Mini 5 Pro’s flight characteristics are fantastic and meet my expectations. Since I primarily use drones for photography, like you, I always capture my subjects with three or five exposures to combine them into an HDR image in Lightroom Classic, just like you do. However, during my first flight yesterday with the Mini 5 Pro, my Syndisk Extreme V30 quickly became overloaded when I tried to take my three exposure brackets for a panorama. Writing to the card felt incredibly slow, which is certainly due to the 50 megapixels per image. This is extremely problematic in rapidly changing lighting conditions, and I definitely had a time advantage with the Mavic 3 Classic in those situations. Which card do you use? Best regards, Markus
Hello Markus,
I also use the Sandisk Extreme V30 with 512GB*. It’s true that creating a 50-megapixel bracketing panorama takes a very long time. However, I don’t think it would be any faster with other memory cards; I believe this is simply a limitation of the Mini 5 Pro, which only supports the slower UHS-I standard. I’ve gone back to taking panoramas with 12 megapixels because the 50-megapixel panoramas are huge (often over 200 megapixels) and difficult to edit afterwards, and I don’t really need such a high resolution.
Best regards,
Gerd-Uwe
An interesting comparison, thanks. I have upgraded from a mini 2 to the mini 5. So far I’m quite disappointed with the photo quality at 50 MP. Specifically when shots include bright reflections of sun on water, or trees. I’m seeing large red artefacts along with other colors which are impossible to remove in post. It’s not color noise, it’s bigger. No such artefacts show up at 12 MP. I always shoot in RAW. Has anyone else seen this?
Hello Fred,
in my opinion, the visible color artifacts in the 50-megapixel images are caused by the suboptimal internal processing of the Quad Bayer sensor in the drone. Unfortunately, there is no direct access to the Quad Bayer data, as it is already been converted to the standard Bayer format intern in the drone for the DNG files — this can be seen with suitable tools such as EXIFTOOL. Post-processing the already converted DNG files with DeepPRIME, for example, can therefore only help to a limited extent. My way of improving the output quality is to take almost exclusively 5-exposure bracketing images and merge them into an HDR using Lightroom Classic. This is time-consuming, but the images show significantly less noise and artifacts. The artifacts can further be reduced in Lightroom with color noise reduction, which I then use at almost 100%.
But there is something else that is fundamental. Many people make the mistake of viewing 12-megapixel and 50-megapixel images at 100% and comparing them with each other. The 50-megapixel image ALWAYS loses out in this comparision. If you do so, the 50-megapixel image is enlarged four times, allowing you to see more than four times the detail, which of course greatly aggravates any shortcomings caused by the lens and due to the significantly smaller Pixel size (= more noise). However, it is interesting to compare both using the same output size, e.g., as a print. And there, the 50-megapixel sensor wins again by a clear margin.
Best regards,
Gerd-Uwe