today i want to break down the differences between the mavic 3 and the air 2s to help you decide if
you should upgrade from the air 2s to the mavic 3 or if you should just go ahead and buy the mavic
3 over the air 2s if you're in the market for a new drone but first let's go get some footage
hey my name is jake and i create content here to help solo creators on the go in the process of
gathering this footage i did my best to make sure all the settings were exactly the same and i flew
to as close of the same flight piles as possible in the process we also got stuck with our cars
because we were driving on some back mountain roads that had recently had a fair amount of snow
on them thankfully we were able to get unstuck via a little bit of elbow grease it's 10 degrees
it's a little bit of a breeze blowing time to uh yeah launch this thing and see what it can do
first off the mavic 3 is much quieter than most the other drones i've flown i mean it is less than
three feet away from me and i can talk and hear myself easily over the sound of propellers it's
probably that the propellers the tone is lower it's a deeper lower tone in frequency so it's
more bassy whereas a lot of the other drones had a higher buzzy sound but it's impressively quiet
so it's the air 2s same distance apart definitely a much higher pitch i feel like
it's a little bit louder but i'm not really sure how much louder but anyway there you go
we have to start out by talking about the image quality and the differences between these two
drones in theory because the mavic 3 has a four thirds sensor it should do better in low
light with the air 2s only sporting a one inch sensor but some of my results were actually a
little bit surprising as far as resolutions and frame rates go the air 2s can shoot 5.3 k up to
30 frames a second in 10-bit d-log which is great it can shoot 4k up to 60 frames a second and full
hd up to 120 frames a second when it comes to the mavic 3 the mavic 3 can shoot 5.1 k
up to 50 frames a second it can shoot 4k and cinema 4k up to 120 frames a second
and you can shoot hd up to 200 frames a second but also as part of that where the air 2s
has 150 megabits throughput for the video which gives you a nice amount of detail in the video to
be able to edit with the mavic 3 ups that to up to 200 megabits throughput and when it comes to video
while both of these drones shoot d-log 10-bit the mavic 3 definitely has the more flat more log-like
profile because as you can see here it's just a much flatter image whereas the air 2s has a little
bit more color a little bit more contrast in there they both will still give you lots of room to
color grade and lots of room to push and pull the image around in post but the mavic 3 wins overall
there's also another difference though when you shoot in d-log on the air-2s you can use the iso
to go all the way from 100 up to 1600 where the mavic 3 you have two settings 400 and 800 which
are the dual gain settings so 400 for bright light and 800 for you know darker conditions and this is
where it definitely is different and they will both give you great results but when it comes
to very very low light you don't really want to shoot in log anyway um it just doesn't generally
work out very well so if you shoot in the standard color profile both of these will shoot
from 100 iso all the way up to 6400 iso and i did an extremely low light test here where i was
at iso 6400 you can see both of the images are really noisy i mean i would never use them this
way not surprising considering it has a larger sensor and it does do better in low light but the
results were closer than i thought but here in the extremely low light test again you can see that
at the same settings at iso 6400 the mavic 3 definitely looks brighter even though it has a ton
of noise just like everything else but that is an indication that it is giving you more light so you
should be able to run in the same conditions and run at a lower iso to get a good pleasing image
video is not everything that drones do a lot of people myself included like to use drones for
aerial photography and these drones while they both have 20 megapixel sensors definitely differ
in the amount of dynamic range the mavic 3 gives you 12.8 stops of dynamic range which is just
about a whole entire stop more than the air 2s now the difference is going to be negligible depending
on what you're shooting where you'll see it most is where you have very dark shadows and very
bright highlights that's where the mavic 3 will win in the overall image quality over the air 2s
so if it isn't all about image quality which the mavic 3 does win not by as much as i thought but
it does win it also comes down to performance both of these drones offer fantastic performance
but they differ greatly when it comes to some of the ways they can handle different environmental
conditions the air 2s gives us about 20 something minutes of flight time depending
on how you're using it dji says 31 but we all know that you never get the full flight time but
it does give you 20 something minutes of flight time per battery it handles conditions well
it flew at 10 degrees fahrenheit no problem i've had it down around zero and it's flown no problem
where the mavic 3 definitely brings a big bump in performance in battery life
dji says 46 minutes i've been averaging between 38 and 40 generally depending on how i'm using it and
it's also extremely cold which doesn't help but it definitely lasts a lot longer you get almost a
third a third amount of flight time on 10 minutes basically more flight time with the mavic 3.
but that's not the entire story because the mavic 3 can easily fly at about 46 miles
an hour pretty much all the time and when i was messing with it testing with it it flew
i mean it's just a much faster much more powerful drone and you can tell in the way
it flies and the way it handles it it accelerates faster it gets to places faster just because it
is a larger drone and it will also handle more winds now not as much more wind as i thought
here you can see a clip i shot with the air 2s the winds were blowing 25 30 miles an hour and
in sport mode i was able to combat those um it was a challenge for the drone but the drone did fine
and handled it now the mavic 3 would handle those conditions a little bit easier just
because it is a larger drone it has more power and it'll handle colder weather now my mavic 2
pro i've flown as cold as 40 below zero i don't think the mavic 3 would have any issues flying
that cold provided you take the precautions of making sure your batteries are warm before you
try and take off and you know they're not starting cold if you want to get somewhere
faster the mavic 3 is going to win or if you're tracking vehicles things like that the mavic 3
is going to win the air 2s though definitely holds its own and still does a really good job
and then we come to obstacle avoidance now my disclaimer on this is you should never rely on
obstacle avoidance i fly with obstacle voids off most of the time just because i find that it tends
to ruin more shots than it saves drones at least for me uh but you know you should do what you're
comfortable with however when it comes to obstacle avoidance the drones do differ dramatically
the air 2s has forward upward rear and downward facing obstacle avoidance sensors
that work okay um definitely not as good as the mavic 3 which has 360 degree all of the time
obstacle avoidance if you want it the obstacle avoidance on the mavic 3 is really impressive i'm
gonna just fly it straight at us and that's all i'm gonna do and it's gonna do everything else
it already detected us already detected us and moved to the left
the stick stick is full forward it took a lot longer to go around to figure out a flight path
and get around me and then move forward was the the mavic 3 was like instantly around
and just kept going now there is something interesting that both of these drones
even when you have the obstacle voids turned off you can switch a setting that will give you the
readout on the map and tell you how close or how far away you are from obstacles even when it's
turned off be careful with that because you can accidentally fly it with obstacle coins turned off
thinking it's on but it's not it's just that the obstacle voice is still looking at the environment
and reading the environment out on the display like you see here now obstacle avoidance plays
a big role into things like active track intelligent flight modes because it helps the
drone operate safely in the environment it's in when it's under kind of intelligent flight modes
not been able to test that because the firmware hasn't been released for the mavic 3 yet which
is another consideration if you use intelligent flight modes you may just want to wait or if you
can't wait then the air 2s might just be the drone for you for now now the air 2s has a lot of great
intelligent flight modes they all work really well but again without sideways sensors you have to be
aware a little bit more of what's around the drone and its surroundings as it's flying through those
intelligent flight modes so as soon as the mavic 3 firmware is updated and we get those intelligent
flight modes i'll be doing a video about it and it'll be linked up in the corner here and you can
watch that right there but i with dji's track record of their intelligent flight modes and
their active track i can only assume and my best guess is that it will be improved with the mavic 3
and it will do a better job especially with the 360 obstacle avoidance it definitely should
give it more opportunities and better ability to track an object through different types of spaces
when it comes to size and weight this is where the use cases really start to differ if you're
doing a lot of traveling a lot of backpacking a lot of carrying everything on your back like i
do the air 2s is going to win because it comes in at 650 grams but when you add even other batteries
the controller everything together the air 2s is a much smaller package and will fit
much easier into your camera bag while also adding less weight the mavic 3 definitely
quite a bit bigger at 900 grams or almost 900 grams but it also is just a lot bigger period the
batteries are much larger and so when you put the whole fly more kit into your backpack it's going
to take up considerably more space than the air 2s so if you're somebody who travels a lot and you
want really good image quality i think the air 2s wins hands down just because its size form factor
and the weight that it brings but it still has fantastic image quality and before we jump into
the price difference which is significant we got to talk about range a little bit now
both of these drones will fly well beyond your visual line of sight so i don't do range tests
because there's really no point they both will fly for miles without having any issue with range
now let's talk about pricing because this is where these drones differ dramatically and then i'll
give you my opinion about which drone is the right drone for you depending on your use case scenario
the mavic 3 definitely is an expensive drone if you're a hobbyist it's twenty two hundred dollars
for the drone if you get the fly more kit which is what i recommend you do it's three thousand
dollars basically so that is quite an expensive drone where the air 2s comes in at right about a
thousand dollars by itself or 12 1300 for the fly more kit so less than half the price of the mavic
3 and i think that you get about 90 something percent of the performance of the mavic 3. so my
opinion is that if you don't need the utmost image quality and the just the best performance you can
get in a compact and foldable drone then the air2s is the best value drone on the market for the
imaging quality you get the mavic 3 is really for somebody who makes a good amount of money
using drones or you just absolutely budget's not an option or but just not an object and you just
want the best image quality that you can get in this sort of form factor drone right now there
are links below and if you want to see reviews and comparisons of other drones including the mavic 3
with the skydeal which will be coming when the active track comes out and the mavic 2 pro then
click or tap right here because i put together a playlist of other drones that i've worked with
and compared 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 will see you again soon in the next video cheers