Mavic 3 Pro image sharpness and Adobe colour profiles

[remotehorizons]

Hi everyone, I recently ordered a Mavic 3 Pro, but returned it upon arrival without opening it. Whilst I was waiting for it to arrive I had discovered the well documented issue in relation to the blurred area in the lower centre of images taken with the wide-angle lens.

I had spoken to a few owners and someone told me he had to order 3 copies before he got an acceptable one, and I noticed that even units given to the likes of DPReview had this issue. Some people sent me samples and all the RAW files had this same problem.

Is this issue now fixed in the more recently produced units? There are countless threads about it and it is clearly a defect, but most of the samples I saw were from units produced shortly after the drone came out. It is a real shame, because the 3x in particular would be very useful for my landscape work.

I think this problem paints the current generation of drone reviews in quite bad light - I couldn't find a single review in which this problem was pointed out. The only people sharp enough to spot it have been the users who thankfully report their experiences on forums such as this.

Another issue which made me change my mind was the lack of colour profiles for Lightroom. Again, the Mavic 3 series has never had these whereas the Air 2s (my current drone) and some others do. Is this an Adobe problem or a DJI problem? Without those profiles the colours from the Mavic 3 Pro RAW files quite simple can't match the Air 2s and Mavic 2 Pro.

 

[Filmarik]

Hi everyone, I recently ordered a Mavic 3 Pro, but returned it upon arrival without opening it. Whilst I was waiting for it to arrive I had discovered the well documented issue in relation to the blurred area in the lower centre of images taken with the wide-angle lens.

I had spoken to a few owners and someone told me he had to order 3 copies before he got an acceptable one, and I noticed that even units given to the likes of DPReview had this issue. Some people sent me samples and all the RAW files had this same problem.

Is this issue now fixed in the more recently produced units? There are countless threads about it and it is clearly a defect, but most of the samples I saw were from units produced shortly after the drone came out. It is a real shame, because the 3x in particular would be very useful for my landscape work.

I think this problem paints the current generation of drone reviews in quite bad light - I couldn't find a single review in which this problem was pointed out. The only people sharp enough to spot it have been the users who thankfully report their experiences on forums such as this.

Another issue which made me change my mind was the lack of colour profiles for Lightroom. Again, the Mavic 3 series has never had these whereas the Air 2s (my current drone) and some others do. Is this an Adobe problem or a DJI problem? Without those profiles the colours from the Mavic 3 Pro RAW files quite simple can't match the Air 2s and Mavic 2 Pro.

I can attest to this from my own experience with M3. I have to declare upfront that I am professional architectural photographer so perhaps I scrutinise the photos more than an average person.
I think you should have at least opened the box and bench tested the camera at home to see if it suffers from this issue. The 3x and 7x cameras are apparently not suffering from these issues. I do not have the Pro, so I can not comment but saw some samples and they looked pretty darn good!!
Anyway here is my story:
I bought the first unit back in Oct 2022, the M3 Cine version. The main 24mm camera had blurry double vision oval area on left side, just off centre. I returned it attributing this to just a bad luck. Second Cine unit had badly decentered lens with entire half of the frame soft. I returned it and decided to try the non Cine version. I thought I would be using the M3 more for photograhy than video anyway but that might change in the future hence my decision to buy Cine.
Anyway, the third M3 non Cine had blurry double vision area on right side and terrible bottom left corner area and right bottom corner was not acceptable either. The top two corners were fairly and at least evenly sharp. I returned it and got the forth unit. While not perfect I've kept it. It does have a marginally softer areas on right and left side of the frame about 2/3 distance from centre and corners though not fantastic, at least at f5 or f5.6 the images I can get out of it, after applying my own LR preset and then finishing in PS, are of an acceptable and reasonable sharpness and perfectly usable and also printable.
I personally think these issues are more common on all M3 versions than most owners are aware of because they simply do not subject their photos to the same level of scrutiny as some others, myself including. When shooting mostly videos these issues might not come to such prominence and perhaps that is the reason why they are not broadly discussed and remain mostly unnoticed. I guess that is what most users do, shoot videos and for that the IQ is good enough even with these flaws.
As for the lack of color profiles, I made my own for LR with ColorChecker Passport from X-Rite. You can make as many as you want for every light, one for sunny day, one for overcast etc etc. Problem solved.