DRONE camera sensors - IS A BIGGER CAMERA BETTER? Phantom 4 Pro vs Mavic Air 2

[GadgetGuy]

Agree with this 100% You can have the best or worst camera in the world but if you don#t know how to treat in post then it doesn't really matter

The automatic settings and automated features enable even a novice to create far better images and video on the M2P than on the MA2, without any post processing. Even the in camera stitched spherical panos on the M2P are far better than the M2A, as they are created from 20MP stills on a sensor 4x larger, rather than 12MP stills on a sensor 1/4 the size. If you know how to handle post, you certainly want the 4x larger sensor of the M2P, and 10 bit color for video.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Only the mm, because I didn't want to get involved in all the stuff which comes with a heavier drone.

I had nearly 20 years experience of film before digital came along, and now have nearly 20 years of digital. My very first film SLR didn't allow you to control everything, but for 35 years I've been more of a limitation than the cameras. Film wasn't much good at concerts where 1600ASA film (only 36 shots) was a special purchase and needed special processing. So for that situation I was limited by film - 6400 on a digital SLR is like old 400 film so that limit no longer applies. High ISO performance won't be great on the MM, but since I can't fly legally in the dark and don't do dawn/dusk stuff it's really not an issue. If I become a better drone pilot and put more time into it I'll invest in something bigger and heavier with a better camera.

Why can't you legally fly at night? Even 107 pilots can still fly recreationally.

 

[BadWolf1]

Why can't you legally fly at night? Even 107 pilots can still fly recreationally.

I'm in the UK. Different laws

I don't think it's an absolute prohibition, I fly under rules which say under 250g I don't have to register, but I need to have sight of the drone at all times. If I put lights on the mini I'd be over the weight limit and if I didn't I'd break the visual rule.
Low light / high ISO performance is a consideration for other people but not for me until I jump through the legal hoops, get a heavier drone, and comply with night flying rules which I don't even know at the moment.

 

[GadgetGuy]

So

I'm in the UK. Different laws

I don't think it's an absolute prohibition, I fly under rules which say under 250g I don't have to register, but I need to have sight of the drone at all times. If I put lights on the mini I'd be over the weight limit and if I didn't I'd break the visual rule.
Low light / high ISO performance is a consideration for other people but not for me until I jump through the legal hoops, get a heavier drone, and comply with night flying rules which I don't even know at the moment.

Sorry, I missed the UK location of your profile. Fair point about the adding of lights on the Mini changing the registration requirements. The 2.7K max resolution of the Mini is a bit of a limitation for video even in daylight, but you certainly can't beat the price! Even CostCo is now selling the Mini!

 

[flakey1977]

Agreed, but not when you factor in the discounted prices that have been available on the M2P. Do you actually own a Mavic 2 Pro to compare, or are you merely assuming sour grapes? I own both, and the 4x larger M2P sensor runs circles around the M2A at dusk and in any low light situation. MA2 is a nice starter drone, but the M2P still excels in every way. True 20MP stills instead of of 12MP, and spherical panos that are incomparable to those of the MA2, especially in low light, to avoid the sun in the image . Full control over all settings in GO4, rather than a crippled set of Fly controls. There is a reason it is called the M2 Pro.

No sour grapes my friend I have the Phantom 4 Pro with its 20MP camera. I agree the 1 inch sensor is a better camera as per the video I made. I am also more than aware that most people watch their videos on their phones, as much as 80% of my Youtube videos are watched on mobile phones. The MA2s image is more than useable when viewed on these devices so taking that and the price point into comparison I'd still go for the MA2 when starting out or as a small portable drone. I've shot wedding footage with the MA2 and it doesn't look out of place next to my Phantom 4 Pro footage. There's no disputing the image quality is better on the bigger sensor drones but any small sensor camera is never going to be amazing. I just love the portablilty when I'm out and about more than anything

 

[GB1Yorkshire1]

Agree with this 100% You can have the best or worst camera in the world but if you don#t know how to treat in post then it doesn't really matter

I have 2 drones a

Only the mm, because I didn't want to get involved in all the stuff which comes with a heavier drone.

I had nearly 20 years experience of film before digital came along, and now have nearly 20 years of digital. My very first film SLR didn't allow you to control everything, but for 35 years I've been more of a limitation than the cameras. Film wasn't much good at concerts where 1600ASA film (only 36 shots) was a special purchase and needed special processing. So for that situation I was limited by film - 6400 on a digital SLR is like old 400 film so that limit no longer applies. High ISO performance won't be great on the MM, but since I can't fly legally in the dark and don't do dawn/dusk stuff it's really not an issue. If I become a better drone pilot and put more time into it I'll invest in something bigger and heavier with a better camera.

Well said, which drone do you fly at the moment?

i think that you asked me what drone do I fly.... I have a phantom 4 and a Mavic Air normally I fly the Mavic.

 

[BadWolf1]

So

Sorry, I missed the UK location of your profile. Fair point about the adding of lights on the Mini changing the registration requirements. The 2.7K max resolution of the Mini is a bit of a limitation for video even in daylight, but you certainly can't beat the price! Even CostCo is now selling the Mini!

I don't have anything which can display 4K video, so again **for me** it's not a limitation. I might have said that about not having 1080p some years back. But TBH I'm still quite happy with standard DVD rather than Blu-ray.

 

[GadgetGuy]

No sour grapes my friend I have the Phantom 4 Pro with its 20MP camera. I agree the 1 inch sensor is a better camera as per the video I made. I am also more than aware that most people watch their videos on their phones, as much as 80% of my Youtube videos are watched on mobile phones. The MA2s image is more than useable when viewed on these devices so taking that and the price point into comparison I'd still go for the MA2 when starting out or as a small portable drone. I've shot wedding footage with the MA2 and it doesn't look out of place next to my Phantom 4 Pro footage. There's no disputing the image quality is better on the bigger sensor drones but any small sensor camera is never going to be amazing. I just love the portablilty when I'm out and about more than anything

Good! I own all three aircraft as well. Most of our 4K video and 20MP quality images are complete overkill for the device of choice for most of the consumers of our output. Sad, but true. The size and stealth of the MA2 can't be beat, and it's output is definitely good enough to please all but the most discerning of consumers at a great price point! Most consumers don't even have access to a 4K monitor! Even 1080p is dumbed down to 360p or 720p by YouTube by default, to conserve bandwidth, unless you deliberately upgrade the download quality back up to 1080p!

 

[GadgetGuy]

I don't have anything which can display 4K video, so again **for me** it's not a limitation. I might have said that about not having 1080p some years back. But TBH I'm still quite happy with standard DVD rather than Blu-ray.

Even if the output is only 1080p, there are distinct advantages to shooting the original footage in 4K, especially in terms of being able to losslessly zoom in, in post, for more impact, and to change your composition. Effectively, you have a lossless 2x zoom in post, if you shoot in 4K and output to 1080p.

 

[BadWolf1]

Even if the output is only 1080p, there are distinct advantages to shooting the original footage in 4K, especially in terms of being able to losslessly zoom in, in post, for more impact, and to change your composition. Effectively, you have a lossless 2x zoom in post, if you shoot in 4K and output to 1080p.

Not really lossless. 4K down-sampled to 1080p is better than than 4K cropped to 1080P. Especially if you're selecting away from the middle. How so ?
A lens lays down a certain amount of information on the sensor, and it's sampled with a certain number of pixels, information captured is a combination of what the lens formed and the sampling. (The rule is 1/res_of_lens + 1/res_of_medium = 1/res_captured)
So 4x the number of pixels doesn't give 4 times the information without a corresponding lens improvement: on the stills world I explain it like this
My first DSLR had a 6MP sensor. Let's say some pretend lens puts down information such that with 6MP I capture 90% of it.
Then I upgraded to a 12MP camera. Plainly I can't capture 180% of the lens info, it's more like 95%
Then a 24Mp camera comes along, now I capture 97.5%
And a 48MP 98.75
etc. That's why chasing pixels is a law of diminishing returns game.
Cropping the 12MP down 6MP is throwing away 47.5% of the lens's information and keeping 47.5%

It is mostly true if the sensor gets bigger. If the 48MP is 36x24mm and the 24MP is half the area (APS-C is roughly half it's actually 4/9ths ) then the central 24MP from the 48 is the same as I would have got if I'd put the smaller 24MP sensor in the same place. However if I take 24MP from one corner it's not as good because lenses are better in the centre.

Cropping is not so much zooming, as a switching to an inferior lens with a longer focal length

And with all that said, I'm rather undemanding of video and if I want to crop from 2K7 that's probably enough. I suspect with the mini's camera discarding 50% of what the lens gave me will be enough of a loss. If DJI had put a 4K sensor in the back and people discarded 75% of it I'd expect the results to be fairly disappointing.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Not really lossless. 4K down-sampled to 1080p is better than than 4K cropped to 1080P. Especially if you're selecting away from the middle. How so ?
A lens lays down a certain amount of information on the sensor, and it's sampled with a certain number of pixels, information captured is a combination of what the lens formed and the sampling. (The rule is 1/res_of_lens + 1/res_of_medium = 1/res_captured)
So 4x the number of pixels doesn't give 4 times the information without a corresponding lens improvement: on the stills world I explain it like this
My first DSLR had a 6MP sensor. Let's say some pretend lens puts down information such that with 6MP I capture 90% of it.
Then I upgraded to a 12MP camera. Plainly I can't capture 180% of the lens info, it's more like 95%
Then a 24Mp camera comes along, now I capture 97.5%
And a 48MP 98.75
etc. That's why chasing pixels is a law of diminishing returns game.
Cropping the 12MP down 6MP is throwing away 47.5% of the lens's information and keeping 47.5%

It is mostly true if the sensor gets bigger. If the 48MP is 36x24mm and the 24MP is half the area (APS-C is roughly half it's actually 4/9ths ) then the central 24MP from the 48 is the same as I would have got if I'd put the smaller 24MP sensor in the same place. However if I take 24MP from one corner it's not as good because lenses are better in the centre.

Cropping is not so much zooming, as a switching to an inferior lens with a longer focal length

And with all that said, I'm rather undemanding of video and if I want to crop from 2K7 that's probably enough. I suspect with the mini's camera discarding 50% of what the lens gave me will be enough of a loss. If DJI had put a 4K sensor in the back and people discarded 75% of it I'd expect the results to be fairly disappointing.

Agreed, if the 4K was from the Mini, were it capable of 4K. I was thinking more of 4K on the M2P being output in 1080p, where cropping would likely go unnoticed in the downsampling, as its 1” 4K is really essentially four 1080p 1/2.3 sensor frames combined. Obviously, you would want to use a center based 1080p crop or effective zoom for best resolution from the lens.

 

[Droning on and on...]

It's very simple. The bigger the sensor, the more light which lands on it and the more information digitized...

Would you rather have a 1" sensor with 100 pixels or a 1/2" sensor with 1,000,000 pixels? Is there really more information digitized on the 1" sensor?

Things aren't always as simple as they appear.

 

[BadWolf1]

Would you rather have a 1" sensor with 100 pixels or a 1/2" sensor with 1,000,000 pixels? Is there really more information digitized on the 1" sensor?

Things aren't always as simple as they appear.

No, they aren't (and I over simplified it) but you missed the point. For the same scene, illumination, aperture and shutter speed, four times as many photons land on the 1" sensor. A sensor maker might have some edge case application where they want to divide those photons between only 100 pixels but generally we're not looking at packing 10,000 times as many pixels into the 1/4 of the area.

For a given efficiency converting photons to measurable electrons we can say "for ISO 100 illumination we have X digitized photons." (or whatever you want the base ISO to be). On a full frame camera with ~40MP and 14 stops of Dynamic range (counting 0-2^14 = 4096) X would be ~16 billion. For the same efficiency a 1" sensor would have ~2 billion digitized photons. Do we go for 40MP with a lot less DR at ISO 100 ? Or 20MP with a bit less DR ? Or 6MP with about the same DR ?
OR do we change the base ISO so more light must land before the image is properly exposed. (My iPhone goes down to ISO 25, and with a lens of ~f/2 it can get a usable shutter speed a lot of the time). And when we shrink the sensor to 1/2" do we say we have 0.5 billion photons to share between the pixels, or drop the ISO to get the number back up....

That efficiency is important, old sensors were inefficient, big, slow and had few pixels, efficient modern ones can be smaller with more pixels and more DR at a higher ISO

My full frame SLR has a crazy top ISO and I think the iPhone at ISO 25 is counting more photons from a much smaller area than the SLR counts at ISO 204,800. Of course if I need such a high ISO the iPhone probably can't make a picture at all. And it's great to have 14 stops of DR, but we throw away some at each end to make an image that can be viewed on screen (unless doing HDR from one exposure) - some captured information is usually wasted.

 

[Droning on and on...]

No, they aren't (and I over simplified it) but you missed the point.

No, you missed my point.

You tried to make something complex sound simpler than it is.

I'm not arguing about which sensor is better, I'm arguing that you shouldn't use such a broad generalization to explain a complex phenomenon.

Nothing more.

 

[BadWolf1]

No, you missed my point.

You tried to make something complex sound simpler than it is.

I'm not arguing about which sensor is better, I'm arguing that you shouldn't use such a broad generalization to explain a complex phenomenon.

Nothing more.

The first sentence was a simplification, not sure if your read the rest where I went into why small sensors were useful. A sensor turns light into data: the more light converted the better. However what the sensor does isn't the whole story.

 

[Droning on and on...]

The first sentence was a simplification, not sure if your read the rest where I went into why small sensors were useful. A sensor turns light into data: the more light converted the better. However what the sensor does isn't the whole story.

Agreed. Coming from astrophotography, I have a decent understanding of what's going on. In the astro forums, we talk about image scale in arcseconds per pixel. And there aren't a lot of photons to gather when you're photographing a faint galaxy.

Cheers!