The DJI Air 3 is an advanced travel drone that evolved the DJI Air series by including dual cameras. Its latest successor, the DJI Air 3S, positions itself as the ideal drone designed for travel photography, featuring a similar 1/1.3-inch CMOS tele camera and an enhanced 1-inch CMOS wide-angle primary camera.
While the DJI Air 3 is considered the flagship drone in the Air series, some have concerns about whether the added cost is justified. Learn about the improved features of the DJI Air 3S to help you decide if DJI's latest camera drone is the right choice for you.
Enhance Your Travel Photography: Upgraded Camera Capabilities
The DJI Air 3S features an upgraded dual-camera system that includes a 1-inch CMOS primary camera and a 1/1.3-inch CMOS medium tele camera. These two cameras capture scenes with stunning clarity and richness, from breathtaking landscapes to captivating cityscapes.
The 1-inch CMOS primary camera of DJI Air 3S excels in capturing clear, detailed images with superior light sensitivity, resolution, and color fidelity. Its larger sensor ensures enhanced low-light performance, higher image quality, and a wider dynamic range. This enhanced camera makes DJI Air 3S ideal for capturing incredible photos in low-light conditions, perfect for expansive landscapes, intricate architecture, and dynamic urban scenes.
Improved Flight Performance
You might already be familiar with Omnidirectional Obstacle Sensing, which enables camera drones to detect obstacles in all directions and plan flight routes in advance.
The DJI Air 3S takes this safety feature to another level by implementing a forward-facing LiDAR to achieve nightscape omnidirectional obstacle sensing. This feature enables the drone to automatically identify and circumvent obstacles such as buildings during its flight and return paths, ensuring robust safety for nighttime photography.
To top it off, DJI Air 3S features next-gen Smart RTH with enhanced precision. Powered by real-time vision positioning and map construction technologies, DJI Air 3S memorizes flight paths when adequate lighting is available. This feature ensures a safe return, even when taking off from locations without satellite signals, such as balconies.
Elevated Intelligent Functions for Travel Photography
When encountering expansive landscapes while traveling, many often find that their cameras or phones cannot capture all the vast beauty in one shot. To solve this issue, the DJI Air 3S features Free panorama mode.
Both the primary camera and medium tele camera of DJI Air 3S offer Free panorama mode, letting you create seamless panoramic shots by stitching together multiple images with a manually selected subject or area. The wide-angle camera offers a broader FOV, boosting efficiency when capturing panorama photos. The medium tele camera significantly reduces image distortion, crafting your masterpieces into expansive shots with a wide perspective from multiple photos and rich details captured through its focal length advantages.
And with optimized ActiveTrack 360°, DJI Air 3S now can keep the subject in focus even if the lower half of their body is partially obscured by bushes or if they are standing on a bridge.
DJI Air 3S also supports user-favorite features like 2.7K vertical shooting, MasterShots, QuickShots, Hyperlapse, and more, putting a massive creative toolkit together in one compact drone.
Design and Portability
It's essential not to underestimate your storage needs while traveling. That's why DJI Air 3S comes with 42GB of built-in storage, enabling longer, uninterrupted flights without the need to frequently offload files and providing redundancy in case of connectivity issues or data transmission failures during flights.
You can now send files from your Air 3S to a smartphone even when the drone is powered off. Transfers to a computer can also be done with the drone powered off—simply connect Air 3S via a compatible USB cable.
With all these improvements, it's impressive that DJI Air 3S remains compact, weighing only 724 g, while offering an impressive maximum flight time of 45 minutes.
Performance and Value
The DJI Air 3S is undoubtedly equipped with a range of remarkable upgrades. From the upgraded 1-inch CMOS primary camera to the innovative Free panorama feature, enhanced nightscape obstacle sensing and next-gen Smart RTH, every aspect is tailored for travel photography.
If you desire to effortlessly capture the breathtaking landscapes of your journey with greater ease, upgrading to the DJI Air 3S is undeniably a worthwhile choice.