Schlagwort-Archiv: DJI Mavic 2 Pro

mavic 2 pro | day 3

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for day 1 see → this entry.

drone with master. photo: ms/picture alliance

it’s been my third flight session, with only one battery, so restricted to slightly less than 30 minutes. i was still focussing on flight patterns rather than on the camera. the inflight videos were all of great quality. the shot after having landed safely has a ton of chromatic aberration. see below.

i flew all quickshot modes today, and they all did a great and very precise job. the spiral and boomerang are a bit irritating at first, because you have no control about the extension range of those kind of flight. and i still don’t know how to direct a boomerang ellipse into a special direction. imagine you’re climbing a cliff, you want to make sure the drone does fly away from the rocks rather than into them!

some modes give you extra options when you touch the icon again on the screen, others don’t, or they give you just rudimentary options like flying a pattern clock- or counterclockwise.

it’s nice to see that the drone comes back to it’s starting point once it has finished the quickshot flight. it does not repeat the flight, however. once the circle is finished, it is finished.

the videos are stored internally (on the internal 8 GB flashmemory bank or on the microSD card) in the original resolution, but the more interesting versions (in probably lower resolution) are sitting on your smartphone. example: all quickshots are accelerated in the smartphone version, whereas they playback in realtime when downloaded from the drone itself.

i’ve flown the mavic pro 1 for over a year and sold it to a man who uses it for flight only. he’s been a fan of radio controlled “model” airplanes since he was a kid, and he always wanted to fly a versatile, agile drone. he flew the mavic much more professional than i.

the more i get to know the automated flight modes, the more i know that flying the drone is cool and challenging, but much more interesting for me is taking precise videos and photographs for wikipedia and the german press agency dpa. so, the new automated flight modes plus the 360° obstacle detection come in extremely handy.

hasselblad at f 2.8

as to chromatic aberration: massive. there’s nothing lilac or pink on my bike. this detail is of 100% resolution:

lots of chromatic aberration

mavic 2 pro | first impressions

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DJI mavic 2 pro. packshot

for day 3, pls check out → this blog entry.

the first mavic was a masterpiece in many respects: the first affordable, reliable, small drone with a better than decent photo quality. i praised the device → a year ago when i had flown it for a couple of months. in the meantime i’ve flown it 22 hours in total before i sold it to a gilder pilot last week.

during the last months DJI released a platinum and an air model which did not really interest me. but the new mavic 2, just released two weeks ago, did. i flew it only once, this morning. here are my first impressions:

the drone is significantly heavier (about 100 grams, which is more than 10%) and feels slightly more bulky, although it’s not really bigger in size. i still have to get used to holding it, because it’s covered with sensors which i don’t want to put my fingerprints on.

connecting everything and calling up the DJI Go 4 app which i had used with my previous mavic, worked, but registration of the new drone failed. i uninstalled and reinstalled the app, then registration worked fine. however, the drone wanted a firmware update, which failed. it would have flown with the current firmware, but it wanted to be updated. many customers have that problem. we never had it with the mavic 1.

my workaround was this: i uninstalled the DJI assistant software from my PC and reinstalled it, in version 2. i connected the drone via USB and could get the new firmware loaded into the device. it took about 15 minutes.

having set up everything for flight again, the controller moaned. it wanted a new firmware, too. after one error message it worked. 5 minutes or so, then the drone was ready to go.

it starts up differently from the predecessor, with much less power, quite sweet actually. when taking off it was obviously more quiet than the mavic 1. i flew it in P-mode and had the impression that if flew somehow more precisely, although i never had a problem with flight precision of the mavic 1. very nice to fly. and very fast.

i tried out two quickshot modes, the “dronie” (which basically is an animated selfie where the drone shoots away and keeps me in focus all the time) and the “circle”. the object recognition is so super precise, the UI of the app is elegant. not comparable to the previous model, excellent.

i did not have much time to check things out and flew the drone home after 20 minutes or so. the battery indicator still was in the middle, so i could have flown quite a bit longer.

the camera? later, folks. no time for that today.