this is the air 2s and this is the mini 3 pro which one of these drones should
you buy if you're in the market for a new drone let's find out
hey my name is jake and i create content here to help solo creators on the go so i test and review
lots of drones cameras lenses in places like this in alaska and i give you tips and tutorials on how
to use them if that's something interesting consider subscribing today we're testing the
air 2s and the mini 3 pro see which one of these drones might be the best drone for you obviously
there's a little price difference we'll break down all the specs and give you lots of examples of
footage between the two drones comparing them and giving you as close to exact as the same framing
flight paths all that so you can make a decision on which one of these drones might be best for you
and to compare as closely as possible i don't have any filters for the mini 3 pro yet and that's why
i'm not going to use them to make it fair i'm not going to use them on the air 2s yet either
as far as specs goes these can be somewhat subjective depending on how you're using them
that's why i'm trying to provide as much side-by-side video of the same stuff and
side-by-side photos of the same stuff so you can see for yourself the air 2s offers up to 5.4k 30
frames a second in 10-bit d-log which is fantastic 10-bit d-log is great to color grade with
i've used this on professional shoots for tv shows where it's intercut well with an inspire 2 when
we've had really tight space and not been able to fly an inspire 2 this has been a go-to drone
and nobody's complained about it that being said you cannot use active track in 5.4k you have to
drop down to 4k 60 or 4k 30 to be able to use active track and there is no like hdr mode or
anything like that because you have this one inch sensor that's sort of what you get but it is great
the low light performance on this is excellent it works really well all the way up to about iso 800
or so and then it starts to fall apart pretty quickly i would never go higher than iso 1600
without using denoiser even with using denoiser i wouldn't use more than a higher iso than 1600
but this is a great drone fantastic video out of this i'll talk about photo more in a minute
when it comes to the mini 3 pro you're maxed out at 4k 60 but it will active track in pretty much
all the video modes that it has even in 4k 60 when you drop to 4k 30 or below it it goes into
high quality mode which essentially is sort of a an hdr like video it's not i don't know that it's
true hdr it's been really hard for me to tell but it does drop down into what they call 4k hq in 30
frames a second it's very nice the details between both of these drones are excellent they both
have fantastic video coming out of this the mini 3 pro does have 10-bit color which is spectacular
because it gives you a lot more room to color grade with however it's in d city like and i don't
like color grading dc in the like as much i feel like you have to work a little harder to make it
look good but it does look great when you work with it and when you get it dialed in it looks
fantastic for slow motion both of these drones will shoot 4k 60 they both shoot hd full hd 1080p
up to 120 frames a second it was difficult for me to see the difference between the two drones
on the controllers both look very similar slow motion if you're going to shoot a lot of slow
motion you can see here on the screen the two shots what they look like um it's hard for me
to tell the difference but i think it's kind of six and one half dozen when it comes to low light
video with the mini 3 pro i've not had a lot of opportunity to test it because it's alaska
it's the summer time and we don't get a lot of low low light but from everything i've seen online and
the limited testing that i've been able to do with this the low-light video out of this is really
good and it does really well up to about iso 800 or so and then it starts to fall apart but because
this has a really uh wide aperture of 1.7 then you it actually does do incredibly well at low light
much better than i thought it would do and i would say it's it i mean it's really close to
the r2s they're very very similar so i don't think one of them is really going to win out
in low light maybe this edges out the mini 3 pro just a touch because it's a larger sensor but
really it's very close much closer than i thought it would be
but then we come to photos and this is where i really feel like the air 2s is the clear winner
because it has the one inch 20 megapixel sensor you get a 20 megapixel raw photo
which is great it gives you lots of different options for doing different
types of photos hyper lapses all that you can save all the raw files and then also you know
use them edit them in post they they look great they're really editable they they have a lot
of range to them from such a small drone you can really push and pull things around
the mini 3 pro has 12 megapixel stills but it also has what they're calling 48 megapixel stills
it's not true 48 megapixel stills like you have a 48 megapixel sensor what they're doing is kind
of breaking the sensor up by four and so you get this sort of little more detail a little bit extra
detail mode to it you do get extra you do get more information but it's not the same as like
having a true 40 megapixel 48 megapixel still as i've been editing these files and working
with the photos there's a couple things i really need to point out especially if you use drones
mainly as a photography tool and the biggest one is that the mini 3 pro exhibits some pretty
major color fringing on both the purple and green not so much the green as much as the purple but
definitely in the purple you can see here both in the 12 megapixels and the 48 megapixel photo
there's quite a bit of purple fringing now yeah this is easy to correct in lightroom it's easy
to correct in post but you need to be aware that it's quite different the other thing i noticed is
that there's a pretty significant difference in the way the photos look from the 12 megapixels
to the 48 megapixels i guess it shouldn't be surprising considering what they're doing with
the sensor in order to get those 48 megapixels but just something you need to be aware of that
if you're using these primarily as a photography tool the air 2s is a much better drone for that
currently one thing on both video and photo modes if you do a lot of stuff on
facebook instagram youtube shorts uh tick tock then obviously the mini 3 pro is going
to be the one you want because it will rotate the gimbal 90 degrees and give you real true vertical
video shooting which gives you much better quality and much you know full quality photos
as far as battery life flight time handling all of that that's where it gets a little more in
the weeds and it's going to depend more on your particular use case scenario but
the air 2s gives you about 26 minutes of flight time dji says 31 but let's be realistic
26 minutes 27 minutes is about right depending on conditions it will fly up to 42 miles an hour and
it will descend up to 13 miles an hour which is really fast it will ascend almost at that speed
too which gets you places quickly when you need to go somewhere in sport mode get to a location
and then start filming or taking pictures the air 2s is spectacular for that it will handle
extremely high winds like up to 35 miles an hour with ease and you don't see it in the footage it
really does well unless you're close to something in really high winds you can see it here flying
over the ocean incredibly high winds it did incredibly well that was 35 mile an hour winds
with 40 mile an hour gusts and the drone did great now obviously the closer you get to an object
the more you are going to see wind in the in the video but even at that the air 2s does great in
high winds like that because it is a bigger drone and a little more weight to it it's 595 grams
it just handles wind better and air movement better even when it's close to stuff where the
uh mini 3 pro with the standard battery obviously much lighter weight so you get a little longer
flight time 28 minutes maybe in that range with the standard battery up to 47 minutes dji says
with the extended runtime battery my experience has been more like 38 minutes maybe 39 minutes
depending on conditions which still that's massive it's like 30 more flight time which is great but
with the standard battery or the extended battery you definitely see this move around a lot more
in the wind for max speeds i've been seeing pretty consistently 35 to 36 miles an hour which is crazy
impressive for a drone that's this small and this slice lightweight it does uh ascend and descend
slower than the air 2s here i was seeing about eight maybe eight and a half miles an hour decent
speed in sport mode and of seven miles six and a half seven miles an hour in ascent mode uh which
is still fast but definitely not as fast if you need to get somewhere quickly and start filming
you're obviously a little slower and because of that too you can't handle quite the same amount
of winds now this does handle impressive amount of wind for its size i've been flying in 20 25
million hour winds and it's handled it well the gusts all of that but the downside of having such
a small lightweight drone is you definitely see it move in the wind a lot more you can see some of
that footage here where it's bobbing around quite a bit obviously because of the amount of wind it
was flying in and that's one of the advantages of having a larger heavier drone and one downside
with the mini 3 pro that the air 2s doesn't have is because there is no active cooling there's no
fan inside of this if you work in hotter climates you really have to have this moving through the
air in order to keep it cool you can't just let it sit and not take off for very long
you can't record in a hover for very long and even if you're really pushing against wind or
if you're really fighting wind because of the way this is designed at least at the moment dji might
improve it via firmware or something in the future but it can really tax the battery so this is a
little more sensitive to being able to taxing the battery if you're recording and pushing against or
you know filming in sport mode for long periods of time or if you're in a really hot environment
however uh i've flown this in extremely cold temperatures down to about minus 15 17 fahrenheit
which i think is like minus 25 celsius it'll be in the uh down here whatever the correct
conversion of that is and it has handled it well i've got videos about handle how to handle cold
temperatures with drones this uh but dji says the air 2s is only rated to zero degrees celsius
this dji says is rated to minus 10 degrees celsius which is like minus
17 fahrenheit or minus 20 fahrenheit something like that my conversions are probably all over
the place but uh anyway so this might be a little bit better cold weather drone than
the air 2s is then we come to noise and that's where these drones are dramatically different
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
noise test for the air 2s arm length away between me and the camera four feet from the camera
the mini 3 pro is by far the quietest drone i have ever used the quietest drone i've ever heard
it's insanely quiet so if you're wanting to fly in places where you don't want to draw a lot of
attention to yourself the mini 3 pro is definitely the way to go the air 2s you could definitely hear
it it's a lot louder it just it makes more noise that's what it does and that's also where uh we
come into range distance i have not had any of the range issues this is the fcc version so that can
definitely make a difference i've flown this out to 3 500 feet which is the absolute max i can see
it with my eyes when i put a strobe on it to keep track of it that um i can go and still see it in
my visual line of sight this i've flown out 3 500 feet no problem and i you know can find it keep an
eye keep an eye on it out there but it does either one of these gets very hard to see that being said
this one will disappear from your site a lot faster because it's so much smaller and probably
because it's a lighter color than this uh the air 2s definitely stands out a little more in the sky
and yeah so if you're going to fly at distances you can do that i'm not going to be doing a
max range test because i feel like either one of these drones can fly well below beyond your visual
line of sight i do understand a lot of people have had issues with range on this hopefully
that's something dji can address via firmware or via something that will make that better but
i've had no range issues i've tested this with a standard remote controller with the
little rc pro that it comes with as well if you buy that combo and not had any issues
with either one of those again i've flown out 3 500 feet which is the absolute furthest i
could see either one of these drones with a strobe on the mini 3 pro and had no issues
because both of these drones offer obstacle avoidance the mini 3 pro has forward
rear and down obstacle voids where the air 2s has forward upward down and rear
obstacle voids that gives you the option to use lots of smart features quick shots tracking all
of that active tracking and apas is both on both of these drones uh they both do a great job i
do feel like the mini 3 pro does a little better job active tracking than the air 2s
but they both do spectacularly now when it comes to obstacle avoidance they both
avoid obstacles they both do a great job with apas which is kind of the intelligent flight
path finding tool that dji's built in to get around things or over or through things but i
do feel like the mini 3 pro does a little better than the air 2s and that's probably just because
the updated algorithm that's in the mini 3 pro obstacle voids test drone is 20 feet away that
way pointing straight at us we're going to fly straight toward ourselves and see what happens
nice and now obscure avoidance test with the air 2s so got it on bypass it's in normal mode
20 feet away right there same thing gonna fly straight at ourselves see what happens
so in 5k 30 it does not like to try and use a pass so we're going to try it again
in 4k 30 and just see if that's a little easier for it to avoid us we'll uh we'll find out
so in 5k 30 it definitely did not like that it got right here it did avoid us but it stopped
it basically just stopped so we're gonna try it in 4k32 just to see the difference
the air 2s definitely does better obstacle voids in 4k 30 than 5k for 5.4 k30 which shouldn't
be surprising because the processor is having to handle a lot more data in that 5k mode but
4k 30 the obstacle avoidance did great and one last difference that you have to consider
depending on what you're looking for is your price this starts at a thousand dollars and goes up to
like seventeen hundred dollars if you wanna buy it with the smart controller that's a lot
of money for this drone a thousand dollars twelve hundred dollars sure but more than that i'd have a
real hard time spending that kind of money on this drone this starts uh let's see yeah this starts at
six hundred dollars something and change for just the drone if you already own the the recent dji uh
rcn1 remote and then it goes up to a thousand dollars if you want to buy it with the new mini
smart controller rc pro what they're calling uh the new little smart controller that they have
which is spectacular and if you could afford it i would absolutely get it because it is a
joy to use and i really enjoy it but it is expensive i get it it's a thousand dollars
and then if you're gonna add the fly more combo it's another couple hundred dollars on top of that
um the longer flight time batteries for this are excellent and really worthwhile i think
in my opinion how these drones stack up to other drones click or tap here i've put together a
playlist i'll see in one of those videos as always if you have questions ask me in the comments below
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wednesday nights at 4 pm alaska time 8 pm eastern i will see you again soon in the next video cheers