Air 3S now available (more details inside)

[msinger]

I am disappointed it the Air 3s does not have an adjustable aperture

The Mavic line might be a better fit for your needs. They are a bit pricey in comparison though.

 

[Erk1024]

I'm not sure. DJI advertises it as "50MP Effective Pixels". I updated that above to avoid any confusion.

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.

 

[whiskeybc]

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.

 

[Droning on and on...]

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.

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.

 

[davidarmenb]

Isn't it misleading to call this a 50mp sensor when it's in fact a 12 mp sensor?

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).