this is the dji mini 3 pro we're gonna go test it
wow
so
hey my name is jake and i create content here to help solo creators on the go so i test and review
drones cameras lenses filmmaking equipment here in alaska and i give you tips and tutorials on
how to use them if that's something interests you consider subscribing today we've been testing and
working with well actually i've been working with this for several weeks now but the mini 3 pro from
dji which is i think possibly the most ideal drone if you do stuff like this that i do here hiking
lots of travel stuff like that because of the size the weight
and the incredible performance out of the latest version of this tiny drone i gotta say i'm not
sponsored by dji i bought and paid for this myself i'd wait four weeks for it to come to me and so
these opinions are 100 my own after using this drone almost exclusively for the last few weeks
so we have to start off by talking about the image quality and let's start with video video is taking
a big step up partly and mostly because dji has given us 10 bit color in this drone with these
city lights now d cinelike isn't a log profile it's just sort of a flat color profile but it does
give you a lot more room to color grade and to push and pull colors in post and because it's 10
bit you actually can really push and color grade this image quite a bit now also the image quality
is taken quite a bit step up even though we're still limited to 4k 60 4k 30 that's the highest
resolution we can go but it has taken a big step up also because of the larger sensor size that's
in this it's a one over one point three inch sensor instead of a one over two point three inch
sensor so it's a lot larger it lets it a lot more light and it does a lot better and i have to say
i'm impressed by the image quality coming out of this 4k 60 gives you a little bit of slow-mo at a
really nice high resolution so you get really good quality in 4k 60. you can also get slow motion up
to 1080p up to 120 frames a second which is pretty good uh the 1080 120 frames per second definitely
soft definitely a little mushy but it is pretty good slow motion overall and then you come into 4k
30 4k 48 4k 24 all of those are 4k 25 depending on where you are in the world but those are what they
call hq mode which is kind of a uh sort of hybrid uh hdr mode i really figured that out yet but it
definitely gives you a little bit more extended um ability to see highlights and shadows than if you
were not shooting in 4k 30 or 4k 24 or something like that definitely gives you really nice quality
video and i've been spectacularly impressed but another upgrade that dji made is giving us a much
more open aperture so you can let a lot more light in this is an f 1.7 instead of an f 2.2 or 2.8
depending on what drone you've talked about or 2.4 that lets in a lot more light in case in point on
days like this i have to use nd 64 just to be able to get the exposure down around where i need it
but that is spectacular for low light performance and the low light performance on this drone is
actually much much better than i thought it would be i think it's even rivaling the air
2s you can see a whole comparison video it'll pop up here in the corner the low light performance
of this drone is spectacular i shot a bunch of hyper lapses i shot a bunch of low light
video and you can see here examples of video at iso 100 iso 200 iso 400 iso 800 and iso 1600
now definitely at 800 you start to see some noise and noise reduction kick in and at 600
the image definitely starts to fall apart you could use it for social media be fine but anything
else i definitely wouldn't use it for that but that's not all we also have to talk about photos
as far as photo quality goes this drone does take nice photos you get the option of raw and jpeg
unfortunately you don't get the option of just raw yet but maybe dji will give us out in the future
but the raw photos are nice to work with they have a fair amount of latitude but you are limited to
12 megapixels except for that this is a quad bayer sensor which means you can divide the sensor up
into four and then you get a 48 megapixel still now it's not the same 48 megapixels that you
would get if you had aps-c size or a full-frame 48 megapixel camera but it does give you more
definition and more detail um somewhat and it's noticeable it's just it's not massive so 12 or
48 either one of them look really nice they've good clean images and they're easy to work with
and actually i was surprised how much dynamic range this drone has for being able to edit these
photos in post so along with the option of doing 12 or 48 megapixels you also get auto exposure
bracketing for three or five shots which i use all the time with drones because it just gives you
a lot more you can make sort of an hdr image or you can just pick the best exposure that you like
and you can do timed shots where the drone will take a photo automatically every three or five or
ten seconds whatever you want it to be so if you want to get photos of yourself doing something
like this insane up on a mountaintop you can do that without having to push a button and push
a button and hold the controller or make it look like you're trying to look like you're not flying
a drone and related to but not exactly related to photo quality is hyperlapse mode i've shot a
bunch of hyperlapses now with this drone and to be honest they can turn out really good but there is
one downside and that's because this drone is lightweight and you'll notice this in a ton of
stuff it does get blown around and pushed around by the wind quite a bit so you either have to very
be very meticulous about editing the raw data or raw photos from those hyper lapses to get
in actually a really nice smooth one import all those in your non-linear editor your video editor
and create the hyperlapse yourself and then stabilize it really heavily to be able to
get something this good in this smooth i'll have a whole video coming up and whenever it
does go live maybe it'll be linked up in the uh corners here somewhere and of course you also
get wide-angle panoramic shots where the drone will stitch those shots together you can save
the raw files and stitch them together yourself which does give you a lot of different options
for being able to take photos including 360 photos and of course you also can rotate the gimbal
horizontally or vertically 90 degrees which gives you vertical vertical photos and vertical video
but vertical photos which i actually really enjoy taking and really love certain things
like waterfalls stuff like that just really lend themselves well to vertical photos another big
upgrade they gave us is actually giving us three directions of obstacle avoidance you get forward
down and rear obstacle avoidance which is fantastic because that enabled them to give
us also active track and a lot of different smart shots like master shots which you can see here
this just gives you a lot more options for how you can film how you want to film what you want to use
this drone for and especially for solo creators being able to use something like master shots
or being able to use something like active track to be able to get shots that you just don't have
to work so hard to control the drone while you're filming yourself is absolutely fantastic the
obstacle avoidance does work well the apas does work well i haven't tested it against something
like the skydeal or something like that yet but i will say i think it works forward and backward
at least as well as the mavic 2 the air 2s the air 2 and maybe even as good as the mavic 3 does
which is pretty spectacular again no side obstacle avoidance so you got to be careful about that but
the forward and rear obstacle avoidance does work very well and this is where we come to performance
there have been a lot of complaints about range i've pushed this drone out to 35
to 4 000 feet which i am telling you is the absolute max that you can see this drone out
there and i had to put a strobe on it to keep my eyes on the drone when it was going out
so that's a long way it definitely doesn't have the signal strength of something like the mavic 3
or the air 2s partly i think that might be due to just the design of the drone is there's nowhere
for the antennas to come down like there used to be little feet that came down and so depending
on where the antennas are inside of this drone it just makes it a little bit more difficult to get
that same range that being said i've been very happy with the amount of range that i've gotten
and been able to fly around like through trees and stuff like that without losing
visual uh video sync another upgrade on this drone that i did not expect is how quiet it is this
is by far the quietest drone i've ever used and ever flown here's a sample of what it sounds like
it's the noise test of the mini 3 it's right here arm length in front of me so it's between
me and the camera about four feet from the camera the fact that i can talk to the camera with the
drone between me and my and the camera using an on-camera shotgun mic and not have to raise my
voice is absolutely incredible and what that means is if you push this drone 50 60 70 feet away you
really can't hear it at all that's both a plus and a negative if you used to be able to help
like find your drone wherever you're flying by the sound you're gonna have a much more difficult time
with that now on the other hand this drone is much nicer if you want to fly in places that you don't
want to disturb people or you just don't want to draw a lot of attention to yourself while you're
flying your drone but also on performance we've got to talk about the battery life so with the
normal the 259 gram battery which keeps the whole drone under 259 grams very important if you don't
want to register it or if your country has much more strict rules on drones over that weight limit
but with that i've been getting 26 28 29-ish minutes of flight time depending on how i'm
flying and the conditions i'm flying it in and then with the longer the plus size batteries
the longer run batteries which puts your drone over that weight limit over that 259 grams i've
been getting about 36 to 38 minutes of flight time again depending on conditions which is spectacular
it's really great it means i don't have to charge my batteries as often or take as many
batteries with me but also because these are usbc rechargeable i can take a power bank and recharge
them pretty much anywhere i am so that's what i've been doing today is as i've been using batteries i
put them in a little carrying case or the little 3 case thing which is plugged into a usb port or
usb power pack and then that starts recharging those batteries so essentially i can pretty
much do everything i want to do all day long with these three batteries and this one usb power bank
all this stuff is this extra stuff is all linked in the description and also in the performance
category comes to speed and wind i've been able to ascend and descend at about up to about eight
and a half miles an hour ascending and descending which is pretty good not as fast as the air 2s not
as fast the mavic 3 but definitely not too bad and as far as the fastest i can go forward it's been
about 35 to 36 miles an hour pretty consistently uh regardless of conditions now i've also flown
this in some very high winds 20 25 even 30 miles an hour with some 30 35 mile an hour gusts and the
drone has handled it well but this is where the downside of these very small and very lightweight
drones comes into play is if you're close to an object while you're filming you will see a lot
of movement in the footage it'll still be smooth because the nibble is going to smooth it out but
the drone will move a lot just because it's so much smaller and so much lighter weight it has
a much more difficult time fighting against higher winds so that's something you need to be aware is
if you go to a lot of places where you're going to experience high wind this might not be the drone
for you and one of the things that i've absolutely loved about this even though it's expensive is the
new remote controller it is great the battery life is great having a built-in screen is fantastic
i've enjoyed it i've seen no discernible difference in range between this and this
standard controller so if that's something you're on the fence about i don't and i haven't seen any
difference when i've tested them but i do really like this new controller having two wheels is
great the extra custom button is really nice and the fact that you have a screen built in
that's a little brighter than my iphone screen but i don't have to worry about plugging in my iphone
every single time is absolutely fantastic one thing that's astounding about this
remote controller too is that it's incredibly lightweight the mini 2 was to me one of the best
starter drones because of its performance and the price point that you got it at at 500 or some 500
this is much more expensive at 900 now if you have the rcn one remote or whatever the standard remote
is from dji yes you can buy this for 600 pretty soon it's not shipping yet but apparently it will
like in august or something however i do love this remote and i think it's worth it but it does push
the price up to a thousand dollars and then if you have the fly more kit on there for another 250
or so you're pushing into the 1200 range 1150 1200 bucks and that starts to get
really expensive when you could also get an air 2s now they're very different drones
different uses obviously different weights and stuff like that so that might be your
deciding factor and i'm not saying that this price isn't worth it for this drone
it just is getting expensive and definitely not something i would recommend for beginners now if
you want to see how this drone stacks up to other drones click or tap right there i put together a
little playlist comparing it to the mini 2 the air 2s etc if you want to see how to set this
drone up in the settings that i use for mine click or tap right there i'll take you through how i set
my drone up as always if you have questions ask me in the comments below or join my live stream
wednesday nights at 4 pm alaska time 8 pm eastern i'll see you again soon in the next video cheers