Initial observations on M2P from a photographer

[Frits]

I am OK with the image quality of the Mavic Pro, except for the omni-present brighter circle in the center of video clips. That alone would make me change.
I have indeed not seen that in footage of the Mavis Pro 2.
I take it that this is gone?

 

[KONY]

Hmmm never noticed this on the hundreds videos I took with my mavic 1... Interesting

 

[gnirtS]

Never had that in the Mavic Pro 1.
Uneven softness on images, a ton of noise, burnt out highlights yes but no bright circles!

 

[peros550]

I thing a red toned circle in the center of the screen was mentioned before in MP1 videos. The color accuracy was also so bad for me.
The encoding just couldn't keep up. 60 Mbps for 4K and 45Mbps for 2.7K was simply not enough. The notorious flickering and the water color effect also had created so much frustration to the users. I also remember reports of first Mavics with soft corners. Noise levels in ISO100 was also high.

Hopefully, the MP2 is great upgrade on the camera department. And we see that day by day with photos and videos posted online.

 

[gnirtS]

Sounds like you had a (more) faulty sensor on the M1.

The rest i agree completely with though.

M2 video there's no pulsing, no mush if you dont use sharpening+1. It really is a huge improvement.

 

[Photo Beaty]

I am looking at my MP2 DNG photos that I took yesterday. I am so pleased. I use a Nikon D850, so my expectations for sharp photos that can be printed large are very high. I am happy to see that I can have my MP2 DNGs printed on metal at 24x36 inches with confidence that customers will also be pleased with the quality. To have a flying camera of this quality is a dream come true for me. I am less experienced with video but I can see that the MP2 videos I upload to Vimeo are much better than those from my MP1 and rival the videos from my Inspire 2.

 

[gnirtS]

Ive just done a series of tests at different apertures and different ISOs so will see if there are differences in sharpness (or how bad and where).
Im slowly trying to get a feel for the optimum ranges to keep this thing in.

One thing i am seeing is it has a tendency to overexpose photos by maybe 1/3 to 1/2 a stop.

 

[gnirtS]

OK ive done sharpness and ISO tests.

Basically aperture wise there is very little difference between f/2.8 and f/4. No difference in the corners or centre.

5.6 is ok. When you hit 8 its getting less defined and f/11 is fairly horrible.

As for ISO, 100 is lovely, very clean. 200 has noise but easily dealt with in LR/PS without too much detail loss. 400 theres a big jump in noise to the extent i'd class it as unusable. 800 and 1600 are fairly wortless.

I'll do a proper post tomorrow with the images and 100% crops to show.

 

[Talley]

what do you expect with this camera? I find ISO 1600 to be very usable.

 

[gnirtS]

what do you expect with this camera? I find ISO 1600 to be very usable.

I didnt but in the interests of fairness i checked all the ISOs to do a complete test.
What i did find is ISO200 is usable without any real issues. On the mavic 1 it wasnt.

Finding its just as sharp wide open down to f/4 was a useful find tool

 

[GringoLoco]

I've only had time to fly mine once so far. I don't really have a good base for comparison as it's my first drone. I took a couple quick photos without really putting much effort into ideal settings or composition, but was overall impressed with how they behaved in Lightroom. I didn't at all like the built-in HDR mode as it didn't process for the same look I do and looked more like a standard Auto mode shot. It also didn't save the bracketed DNGs like I expected. But processing the DNGs that I did have was much more like processing DNGs from my Nikon D7200 than from a cellphone camera. I didn't even really NEED bracketing. It was a tad noisier than my Nikon but for what it is, I'm very satisfied. In the future I'll just manually bracket +/- 2 stops and merge in Lr. Can't wait to see how well that works.

Here's a couple shots with a quick and dirty edit, all single DNGs in high contrast, no bracketing, ISO100. The brighter two were f/4.5 and the dimmer one after the sun went lower was at 5.6. I'm very much an amateur and not skilled in editing, I'd love to see what a real pro can do with an M2P.

 

[gnirtS]

Its got the same software limitations of the older drones sadly.
Inbuilt HDR is never going to be great and AEB is fixed at 0.7 stop increments which simply isn't enough.
You'll get the best results manually bracketing shots and merging to HDR yourself in post.

 

[GringoLoco]

Its got the same software limitations of the older drones sadly.
Inbuilt HDR is never going to be great and AEB is fixed at 0.7 stop increments which simply isn't enough.
You'll get the best results manually bracketing shots and merging to HDR yourself in post.

Yeah, I knew going in that I'd likely just do everything manually anyway but tried it out of curiosity. I did expect it to save the bracketed DNGs as well as the median DNG since I had RAW+JPEG selected. I just wish I'd thought to take a couple manual 2 stop brackets. Either way, I was impressed with how well highlights were recovered and shadows were lifted. I'm used to a D7200 not a D5, but still this little 1" sensor definitely behaves more like a real camera than a cellphone camera.

 

[gnirtS]

Agree with that. Mavic 1 was an old cellphone camera even when first released and it felt like it.

This one feels like "good compact". Yes it has limitations but its also more than acceptable for commercial use (stills wise anyway. i dont do a lot of video). It feels like an actual camera.

 

[GringoLoco]

Yeah, exactly. Head to head my D7200 will beat it, by a little, but it also probably weighs more than the entire drone and has a much larger sensor. Relatively speaking, taking the physical limitations into consideration, I'd say the M2P camera smokes my D7200 and that was still a class leading camera just a year ago. I'm actually considering an RX100 for a travel camera now. I also am primarily interested in photo, I'll play with the video as a curiosity that I have no experience with.

 

[PortCanaveralFlorida]

I've only had time to fly mine once so far. I don't really have a good base for comparison as it's my first drone. I took a couple quick photos without really putting much effort into ideal settings or composition, but was overall impressed with how they behaved in Lightroom. I didn't at all like the built-in HDR mode as it didn't process for the same look I do and looked more like a standard Auto mode shot. It also didn't save the bracketed DNGs like I expected. But processing the DNGs that I did have was much more like processing DNGs from my Nikon D7200 than from a cellphone camera. I didn't even really NEED bracketing. It was a tad noisier than my Nikon but for what it is, I'm very satisfied. In the future I'll just manually bracket +/- 2 stops and merge in Lr. Can't wait to see how well that works.

Here's a couple shots with a quick and dirty edit, all single DNGs in high contrast, no bracketing, ISO100. The brighter two were f/4.5 and the dimmer one after the sun went lower was at 5.6. I'm very much an amateur and not skilled in editing, I'd love to see what a real pro can do with an M2P. View attachment 45669 View attachment 45670View attachment 45669 View attachment 45670 View attachment 45672

Nice job on the photos! Looking like a pro already!

 

[NorthGADronePilot]

It's ok.

Don't clutter up the forum with inane posts like that. Seriously, man.

 

[Hauptmann]

I've only had time to fly mine once so far. I don't really have a good base for comparison as it's my first drone. I took a couple quick photos without really putting much effort into ideal settings or composition, but was overall impressed with how they behaved in Lightroom. I didn't at all like the built-in HDR mode as it didn't process for the same look I do and looked more like a standard Auto mode shot. It also didn't save the bracketed DNGs like I expected. But processing the DNGs that I did have was much more like processing DNGs from my Nikon D7200 than from a cellphone camera. I didn't even really NEED bracketing. It was a tad noisier than my Nikon but for what it is, I'm very satisfied. In the future I'll just manually bracket +/- 2 stops and merge in Lr. Can't wait to see how well that works.

Here's a couple shots with a quick and dirty edit, all single DNGs in high contrast, no bracketing, ISO100. The brighter two were f/4.5 and the dimmer one after the sun went lower was at 5.6. I'm very much an amateur and not skilled in editing, I'd love to see what a real pro can do with an M2P. View attachment 45669 View attachment 45670View attachment 45669 View attachment 45670 View attachment 45672

Wow! Can't wait for my M2!