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As I men­tioned in my arti­cle “DJI Mini 5 Pro – Pho­to Qual­i­ty”, I have now pur­chased the new DJI Mini 5 Pro. The main rea­son for the upgrade was the new 1-inch cam­era sen­sor, which I hope will fur­ther improve the qual­i­ty of the pho­tos. But is that real­ly the case?

As in my pre­vi­ous drone tests, I once again took com­par­i­son pho­tos with iden­ti­cal set­tings using both drones from my win­dow. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the sky was over­cast this time.

Both drones were man­u­al­ly set to ISO 100 and an expo­sure time of 1/200s. Focus was set via the touch­screen on the gable of the house with the orange clink­er bricks. The pho­tos were tak­en simul­ta­ne­ous­ly at the high­est res­o­lu­tion (50 and 48 megapix­els, respec­tive­ly) to achieve opti­mal com­pa­ra­bil­i­ty. I ignored the min­i­mal dif­fer­ence in lens aper­ture (Mini 5 Pro f/1.8 vs. Mini 4 Pro f/1.7), which cor­re­sponds to only about 1/10 of a f-stop. The DNG files were then import­ed into Light­room Clas­sic V 14.5.1 and edit­ed min­i­mal­ly with the fol­low­ing iden­ti­cal settings:

I left all oth­er options in Light­room at their default settings.

Overview

Here are both images in direct comparison:

On the left (or at the top when viewed on a mobile phone), you can always see the image from the Mini 5 Pro, and on the right that of the Mini 4 Pro. The direct com­par­i­son already clear­ly reveals that the Mini 5 Pro has a vis­i­bly larg­er field of view.

Light­room Clas­sic uses a lens pro­file inte­grat­ed into the DJI Mini 4 Pro DNG file to cor­rect dis­tor­tion and chro­mat­ic aber­ra­tions in images cap­tured by the Mini 4 Pro. This can­not be dis­abled in Lightroom:

The DNG file of the Mini 5 Pro, on the oth­er hand, does not con­tain an inte­grat­ed lens pro­file and appar­ent­ly does not need one. Either the optics of the Mini 5 Pro have already been cor­rect­ed to such an extent that dig­i­tal dis­tor­tion cor­rec­tion is no longer nec­es­sary, or (much more like­ly!) the cor­rec­tion of the DNG file is instead already per­formed in the Mini 5 Pro by the more pow­er­ful CPU that is like­ly inte­grat­ed there.

The size of the DNG files is also inter­est­ing: the file­size of the Mini 5 Pro is 71 GB, while the Mini 4 Pro file is as large as 96 GB.

How­ev­er, the size of a DNG file only pro­vides lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion about image qual­i­ty. Much depends on the effi­cien­cy of the com­pres­sion algo­rithms. For exam­ple, the CR3 RAW files from my Canon EOS R5 Mark II are only between approx­i­mate­ly 45 and 60 GB in size, depend­ing on the ISO set­ting and sub­ject. As a gen­er­al rule, files become larg­er with increas­ing noise at high­er ISO val­ues and more details in the scene. Noise in par­tic­u­lar can­not be com­pressed effectively.

Image adjustment

Using iden­ti­cal devel­op­ment set­tings, the Mini 5 Pro’s image appears slight­ly dark­er and warmer than that of the Mini 4 Pro. This is like­ly par­tial­ly due to the slight­ly wider aper­ture of the Mini 4 Pro. To make the fol­low­ing exam­ples eas­i­er to com­pare, I there­fore adjust­ed the devel­op­ment set­tings for the Mini 4 Pro image slight­ly to achieve the best pos­si­ble match:

Com­pared to the Mini 5 Pro set­tings, I increased the col­or tem­per­a­ture by 300 °C and the tint by 10, and reduced the expo­sure by 0.4 EV. Here is the result in a direct comparison:

So both images now look quite com­pa­ra­ble in terms of bright­ness and col­or, at least in the overview.

Comparison of details

So it’s time to go into the details. How does the image sharp­ness com­pare in direct comparison?

To do this, I com­pared sev­er­al sec­tions of the images above. To make the dif­fer­ences clear­ly vis­i­ble even on small mobile dis­plays, I enlarged the sec­tions to 400% in Light­room’s com­pare view. As before, the image from the Mini 5 Pro is on the left and the image from the Mini 4 Pro is on the right:

As can be seen in the three com­par­i­son images, the images on the left tak­en with the Mini 5 Pro are actu­al­ly all slight­ly sharp­er, high­er in con­trast, and low­er in noise than those tak­en with the Mini 5 Pro. How­ev­er, the dif­fer­ence is not very large and is only clear­ly vis­i­ble at this high magnification.

Dynamic range

Sharp­ness is only one cri­te­ri­on for the qual­i­ty of a lens/sensor com­bi­na­tion. The dynam­ic range of a sen­sor, i.e., its abil­i­ty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between very bright and very dark parts of a scene in an image, is also very impor­tant. The dark­er the areas in the sub­ject become, the low­er the sig­nal-to-noise ratio of the sen­sor pix­els in ques­tion and the stronger the image noise becomes. Here, I expect­ed a vis­i­ble improve­ment with the Mini 5 Pro due to its larg­er sen­sor and larg­er indi­vid­ual pixels.

Basics

In very bright areas of an image, the sen­sor pix­els will at some point become sat­u­rat­ed, or “ful­ly charged,” so to speak. Any addi­tion­al pho­tons will then have no effect. It is like a full bar­rel that over­flows at some point. Cor­rect­ing over­ex­po­sure in dig­i­tal sen­sors in post-pro­cess­ing is there­fore only pos­si­ble to a very lim­it­ed extent.

The sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent in dark areas. Here, depend­ing on the qual­i­ty of the sen­sor, exten­sive cor­rec­tions are still pos­si­ble. For this rea­son, par­tic­u­lar atten­tion should be paid to the bright, rel­e­vant parts of the sub­ject dur­ing expo­sure (ETTR - Expose to the right) in order to make opti­mal use of the sen­sor’s dynam­ic range.

How­ev­er, the dark­er the areas in the sub­ject become, the low­er the sig­nal-to-noise ratio of the rel­e­vant sen­sor pix­els and the greater the image noise. Here, I expect­ed a vis­i­ble improve­ment with the Mini 5 Pro due to the larg­er sen­sor and larg­er indi­vid­ual pixels.

To visu­al­ize the dif­fer­ences, I took test shots with both drones that were under­ex­posed by 2 2/3 f-stops. To do this, I reduced the expo­sure time to 1/1250 while keep­ing all oth­er set­tings the same. The DNG files cre­at­ed in this way ini­tial­ly appear very dark in Light­room when using the same devel­op­ment set­tings as for the cor­rect­ly exposed images shown above:

When they are bright­ened by 2.66 f-stops each using the expo­sure slid­er in Light­room, they ini­tial­ly look in the overview as they did in the cor­rect­ly exposed shots above:

Below, I am pre­sent­ing the same crops shown above, again at 400% mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, for direct com­par­i­son. As before, the left crop shows the crops from the Mini 5 Pro, while the right crops show those from the Mini 4 Pro:

As expect­ed, both images now show sig­nif­i­cant noise. In a direct com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, I think the Mini 5 Pro per­forms bet­ter again, cap­tur­ing more detail. It is notice­able, how­ev­er, that the Mini 5 Pro has sig­nif­i­cant­ly more col­or noise than the Mini 4 Pro. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in the church win­dow, for example.

How­ev­er, the rea­son for this seems to be that the Mini 4 Pro aggres­sive­ly removes col­or noise inter­nal­ly, result­ing in all images show­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly less col­or detail. This can be seen very clear­ly in the last image tak­en with the Mini 4 Pro, in which all the tiles have almost the same col­or. The Mini 5 Pro con­tin­ues to show the dif­fer­ent red/orange/brown tones that are present.

In the above com­par­isons, it is also worth not­ing that due to the high­er lens aper­ture of the Mini 4 Pro , the expo­sure of the under­ex­posed Mini 4 Pro file in Light­room only had to be increased by 2.26 EV, while that of the Mini 5 Pro had to be increased by as much as 2.66 EV. Despite the stronger adjust­ment, the Mini 5 Pro exhibits bet­ter noise performance.

Although col­or noise is indeed more pro­nounced with the Mini 5 Pro, the images cap­ture the actu­al col­ors of the sub­ject much bet­ter. With the Mini 4 Pro, the col­ors are severe­ly bleached. In this com­par­i­son, I much pre­fer the col­or rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Mini 5 Pro. Fur­ther­more, col­or noise can be removed rel­a­tive­ly well in post-processing.

AI denoising

But we live in the age of AI. For some time now, Adobe Light­room offers an inte­grat­ed noise reduc­tion fea­ture with AI algo­rithms. I was curi­ous to see what could be done with the noisy images above. So I reworked the under­ex­posed drone images with the default set­ting of 50 using the Detail | Denoise menu item in the Develop menu:

Here you can see the denoised crops:

Once again, it’s amaz­ing what AI can still get out of noisy images. In a direct com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, I still like the results from the Mini 5 Pro a lit­tle bet­ter. In par­tic­u­lar, the mason­ry around the church win­dow and also in the last exam­ple shows more details with the Mini 5 Pro, while the struc­tures are more blurred with the Mini 4 Pro, some­times with notice­able artifacts.

Note on my workflow

cI would like to express­ly point out that what is writ­ten here refers to my own work­flow with Adobe Light­room Classic.

Oth­er RAW con­vert­ers may pro­duce dif­fer­ent results. How­ev­er, I think it is unlike­ly that there will be fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences from my results. For those who would like to try it out for them­selves, I have made the DNG files used in this com­par­i­son avail­able for down­load in a ZIP file so that you can do your own tests:

DNG-Files Mini 5 Pro vs Mini 4 Pro (Cau­tion, 258MB download!)

Addi­tion­al DNG test files - includ­ing those from the Mini 3 Pro, Air 3s, iPhone 15 Pro, and my Canon EOS R5 Mark II - can be found at the end of my arti­cle on the Air 3s. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, despite the same motif, direct com­par­i­son with the Mini 4/5 Pro images shown here is dif­fi­cult because the weath­er was sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter and the light was much harsh­er at the time.

Resumée

As good as the images tak­en with the Mini 4 Pro are when using the cor­rect tech­nique and post-pro­cess­ing, the images tak­en with the Mini 5 Pro are even bet­ter. In par­tic­u­lar, the dynam­ic range has improved thanks to the larg­er sen­sor. How­ev­er, the dif­fer­ences are not huge and are actu­al­ly only vis­i­ble at high mag­ni­fi­ca­tions. The AI noise reduc­tion also enables a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in the devel­op­ment result for both cameras.

But the Mini 5 Pro also offers sev­er­al addi­tion­al fea­tures over the Mini 4 Pro, which I have already described in detail in my pre­vi­ous report, “DJI Mini 5 Pro – Pho­to Qual­i­ty”. I would par­tic­u­lar­ly like to men­tion the free panora­ma mode, which I have already used fre­quent­ly and enjoyed using on its big sis­ter, the DJI Air 3s.

Nev­er­the­less, the Mini 4 Pro remains a won­der­full drone that I have used fre­quent­ly and enjoyed using so far. But as is often the case, the bet­ter is the ene­my of the good - so I upgrad­ed to the Mini 5 Pro.

What do you think?