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The Mavic line might be a better fit for your needs. They are a bit pricey in comparison though.
Air 3S now available (more details inside)
- Thread starter msinger
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The thing is, if it's a quad-pixel 12MP sensor, then it would be 48MP not 50MP, right? In any case, the new 1/1.3 sensors punch way above their weight, so if this is a new 1" sensor, maybe will get that same bump in quality? Let's hope.
I'd like to see somebody do a really deep dive into the still photo quality on the main sensor with some comparisons to the Air 2s, Mavic 3, etc. I probably shouldn't care about the 12 MP / quad bayer / pixel binning stuff so much. It's just a hobby for me and at the end of the day I'm posting stuff on instagram for friends and family and occasionally making prints but I do really like playing with stuff in lightroom so I guess I'm a bit of a pixel peeper. I just don't want to feel like I'm getting a downgrade from the Air 2s in the photo quality department.
More than likely I'll end up buying it and end up more than happy.
More than likely I'll end up buying it and end up more than happy.
Droning on and on...
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I'd take a 12MP sensor with useful greater dynamic range than a higher resolution 20MP sensor with less sensitivity all day long. I don't ever blow anything up enough for the resoltion to matter. Dynamic range, OTOH, always matters.
That said, computational photography continues to advance and improve rapidly, AI techniques are adding a whole new level of correcting debayering errors (did you all know vanilla bayer pattern captures have color errors too?), and the challenges of reproducing quad-bayer captures with pixel color properly corrected are being surmount.
It’s just technicalities. It does indeed have 50 million physical photodiodes. So they can say it is 50MP because it really is. However, it uses the quad bayer filter over the sensor which effectively turns four pixels (2x2 square) into one huge pixel, effectively quadrupling the light gathering area. So the actual traditional bayer pixel count would be 50MP/4. (It may do some cropping in 12MP mode to only pixel bin the central 48MP of the sensor, since 48/4 makes a perfect 12. I won’t be sure til my Air 3S arrives Oct 22).
This is also why it has a 50MP mode. In this mode it does not combine the pixels 2x2 and treats them individually. However, since four adjacent pixels have the same color filter, the sensor needs to do some computation (called quad bayer interpolation) to figure out what the true color would have been. This can cause some artifacts since there is some computational “guessing.”
Edit: added diagram
For the Air 3S, left side is 12MP mode, right side is 50MP mode (48MP mode in Air 3).
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waynorth
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True, and these colour artifacts is sometimes a problem on the Mini 4 Pro in 48 Mpix mode.
The Air 3S seems to suffer from the same. A review by Peter Lindgren shows the colour artifacts in this video
Go to 10:00 where he shows the difference between 12 and 50 Mpix, and clearly shows the colour errors in 50 Mpix.
Besides variable aperture, another differentiation from the Mavic Pro series is apparently the type of log profile for recording video in raw?
Also, they haven’t used the quad bayer designs on the Mavic Pro series yet?
Also, they haven’t used the quad bayer designs on the Mavic Pro series yet?
Yes. In the main product page for the Air 3S at DJI website, it advertises the 1” sensor as having 3.2um pixel size and the 1/1.3” sensor as having 2.4um pixel size. Both of these come with a note [5].
When you scroll all the way down to the notes and read [5], it clearly states that these pixel size figures for both sensors are “achieved with QBC (Quad Bayer Coding) techniques that combine four pixels into one. Not supported when shooting 48MP or 50MP photos.”
There is also no way they could turn it into 12MP mode if it wasn’t quad bayer. So even without the [5], it would be almost obvious that it is quad bayer because of that feature alone. Unless they took the photo at 50pm and then just reduced the resolution, which couldn’t be the case because taking photos in 50MP mode takes about three times as long, because it has to read more individual pixels and then interpolate tranditinal bayer from of quad bayer via demosaicing.
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Yes, Mavic pro uses full D-Log. Air and Mini series use D-Log-M, which is technically not a full logarithmic profile. It’s better than nothing but it is not full D-Log. That said, it is still pretty amazing.
However, it is not raw video. There is still a huge differentiation between recording in Log, which still gets compressed into an H.264/H.265 compression, and recording video in raw, where every frame is pretty much a raw photo. Full raw also comes with gigantic files; think about 1GB per second of video.
Although, the Mavic series is supposed to get Apple ProRes 4:2:2 video recording capabilities from what I have heard, if it isn’t already available (don’t know that much about Mavic series). Apple ProRes, however, is still not raw video, but it has much much less compression than something like H.265, giving you much much more latitude when editing your footage due to having only minor (sometimes lossless) compression.
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ryguy80
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The Mavic 3 Cine has ProRes 422 recording capability. It also has a 1 TB SSD onboard for storing these larger files created by ProRes.
Exactly! Shooting in true RAW is very data intense. For example, if I shoot a 24 second clip in RAW on my Sony, the file is 5.5GB so storage and read/write starts to become an issue. That can only record on an external SSD at least on my camera, the internal read/write speed of the camera is not enough to keep up.
The 70mm camera on the M3 Pro is quad-Bayer. Shrug. I really like that sensor by the way. Image quality and the lens are both great (as long as you keep the ISO low). I haven't tried the 48MP mode on it yet. I'm always shooting as part of a panorama, so I don't really need the extra pixels.
Droning on and on...
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The OA is very impressive in that video, I'd say DJI has finally caught up with Skydio w.r.t. OA and path planning to produce cinematic tracking.
Again, really impressed with the Lidar OA. Was a bit turned off, though, by the slick production of his video. Too much of a sales marketing feel.
Droning on and on...
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Since I shoot almost exclusively video, the 50MP mode for stills is pretty irrelevant to me, and all the artifact issues with the QB filter are irrelevant. At 12MP, the sensor is a simple bayer sensor, but with larger pixels than the 1/1.3", giving 14 stops of dynamic range.
THAT'S what I'm excited about with the upgraded camera. My audience does sit there with a still image zooming in to find artifacts to then complain about. They're usually being wowed by the action.
THAT'S what I'm excited about with the upgraded camera. My audience does sit there with a still image zooming in to find artifacts to then complain about. They're usually being wowed by the action.
Caught up to Skydio, I would say not quite yet. Interesting that Skydio has left the consumer game but they haven't left drones altogether; their OA is still superior but DJi will eventually catch up one day I suppose. We'll have to see how practical the new implementation does in real world situations. Those of us who have a Skydio know it's important to have really good 360 coverage and for the drone to be super nimble and capability to adapt. Again. it's too early to tell but when the DJI drone can do this and we start seeing those videos, then I will give them the nod:
The QBC (Quad-Bayer Coding) process is not the same as a Quad-Bayer Filter. It can be turn on and off, hence the mode. They indeed turn on the coding when in 12MP mode and create the 4x super-pixels which is in an effort to sharpen the pixels and provide better low-light performance but the 1" sensor (not 4x12 sensor QB Filter) is 50MP.
That's a strange configuration.
There must be 24 Mp or even 30 Mp 1-inch sensors.
But looks like DJI chose the 50 Mp for marketing reasons.
There must be 24 Mp or even 30 Mp 1-inch sensors.
But looks like DJI chose the 50 Mp for marketing reasons.
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