AlanLichty
Moderator
In spite of the endless public forum noise I decided to take the plunge and bought a Mavic 3. I got it last Monday and of course we have had lousy weather every day since so flying time has been limited. I did take advantage of that and took a lot of images in a desktop to get acquainted with the camera and the controls that differ from my Mavic Air 2. Its hard to not be impressed with the camera system compared to the Air 2 which had no useful camera controls to speak of along with its incredibly limited dynamic range and dirty pixels.
I wasn't prepared for what the second camera on the Mavic 3 could really do. The lens on the second camera is 161mm and has 7X magnification compared to the primary camera with a 24mm lens. The jump between the two cameras is huge. The shots below are from directly over my house taken earlier this week when we had snow on the ground. The first is from the primary camera looking south over Vancouver Lake with the crane towers of one of Portland's container ship docks barely visible in the distance just to the left of center.
This is a shot with the secondary camera from the same hovering location centered on the crane towers at 7X.
Neither of these images are straight out of the camera - both have been fully processed in LR/PS.
The camera controls have a slider for zoom that is continuous from 1X up to 28X although everything except for 1X and 7X are digital zooms which I will basically ignore and stick to optical zoom only. I could have used the 7X camera last month along the southern Oregon coast around all of the little coves and inlets and fully intend to revisit a lot of those places with the M3.
Running the most recent firmware and using the basic RC-N1 controller I have not had any issues with GPS that leave me concerned about the device at the moment. I don't use or rely on Return to Home to end my flights and don't shoot video so for me it's all about getting the drone out to where I want to shoot still images from. My tests so far have been quite positive for how I intend to use it.
I wasn't prepared for what the second camera on the Mavic 3 could really do. The lens on the second camera is 161mm and has 7X magnification compared to the primary camera with a 24mm lens. The jump between the two cameras is huge. The shots below are from directly over my house taken earlier this week when we had snow on the ground. The first is from the primary camera looking south over Vancouver Lake with the crane towers of one of Portland's container ship docks barely visible in the distance just to the left of center.
This is a shot with the secondary camera from the same hovering location centered on the crane towers at 7X.
Neither of these images are straight out of the camera - both have been fully processed in LR/PS.
The camera controls have a slider for zoom that is continuous from 1X up to 28X although everything except for 1X and 7X are digital zooms which I will basically ignore and stick to optical zoom only. I could have used the 7X camera last month along the southern Oregon coast around all of the little coves and inlets and fully intend to revisit a lot of those places with the M3.
Running the most recent firmware and using the basic RC-N1 controller I have not had any issues with GPS that leave me concerned about the device at the moment. I don't use or rely on Return to Home to end my flights and don't shoot video so for me it's all about getting the drone out to where I want to shoot still images from. My tests so far have been quite positive for how I intend to use it.