DJI Air 3S - Worth The Hype?

Purpose of the DJI Air 3S

The DJI Air 3S is designed to be the ideal tool for travel photography, offering both exceptional image quality and the ability to operate safely at night. It also features the new Free Panorama mode, which allows flexible shooting range selections for more creative control.

With its dual-camera system, the Air 3S captures both landscape and portrait content in stunning detail, making aerial photography and videography effortless.

How Does the DJI Air 3S Compare to Its Predecessor?

The DJI Air 3S introduces several notable improvements over its predecessor, including enhanced image quality, especially in low-light conditions, and superior night-time obstacle avoidance. Despite its advanced features, it maintains a lightweight design at just 724g, ensuring maximum freedom and flexibility during flight.

Key upgrades include dual primary cameras and omnidirectional obstacle sensing. The drone is equipped with front-facing LiDAR, downward infrared time-of-flight sensors, and six vision sensors (two on the front, rear, and bottom). This enables it to automatically detect and avoid obstacles, such as buildings, on both its flight and return paths, ensuring safe nighttime operation.

Photography and Video Capabilities

The primary camera of the DJI Air 3S shoots 4K/60fps HDR and 4K/120fps video, offering impressive image quality. DJI also states that the file sizes are reduced by over 30% compared to the previous Air 3 model, thanks to an advanced video encoding algorithm. This allows creators to store more footage without sacrificing quality.

In addition, the Air 3S supports a range of user-favourite features, including 2.7K vertical shooting, MasterShots, QuickShots, and Hyperlapse, providing a comprehensive creative toolkit in one compact drone.

Key Features

• 1″ CMOS Primary Camera

• 14 Stops of Dynamic Range

• Dual-Camera 4K/60fps HDR Video

• 45-Minute Flight Time

• 20km Video Transmission

• Omnidirectional Obstacle Sensing

• 50MP Photos

A New Perspective

The DJI Air 3S comes equipped with 360-degree ActiveTrack, which intelligently tracks subjects, ensuring they stay optimally framed. Based on the flight environment, the drone automatically plans a flight path and adjusts framing to keep the subject in focus, even if partially obscured by obstacles like bushes or bridges.

Additionally, the new Subject Focusing feature maintains a sharp focus on the subject during manual flight or when the subject moves off-centre. This allows users to concentrate on creative aspects such as composition and camera movement, enhancing the overall shooting experience.