When I got my Mavic3 Pro, I took some test shots and noticed some softness in the corners at 100%. Viewing images at 100% is not a hypothetical for me because I have an 8K x 2K ultrawide monitor and when I make wallpapers for it, you see every pixel. In any case, I wanted to see how it compared to my regular (terrestrial) cameras.
In order to test it, I used the full frame Sony A9 which has a similar resolution (24 megapixels), and the Sony 24-105mm zoom lens. This lens isn't perfect by any stretch, but it's good enough that I'm fine with the images I get out of it. If the Mavic3 can keep up with that lens, then it should be good enough for the photos I wanted to take.
So I put up some test charts and started shooting. My camera's zoom starts at f/4, so that's the lowest aperture for an apples to apples test. So let's start there.
Here is an image of the center of both lenses:
They both look really solid--no complaints. Keep in mind, this is 100% zoom and just a small region of the overall image. One thing that's odd is that the Mavic3 had some unexpected color patterns that it somehow got out of a black and white image. I'm assuming this is some weirdness with the demosaic process, but I'm not too worried about it.
Next I looked at the corners. Here is the top left corner:
There is definitely some softness here. But what's amazing is that I think the Mavic3 lens is just a bit sharper? Wow. That's impressive. I realize that I'm comparing a "prime" lens to a "zoom" lens, but the Mavic3's lens is also *tiny*. One thing to notice is that there is significantly more noise from the Micro 4/3's sensor, even at ISO-100. Also the corner is quite a bit darker than the center, so there is some significant vignetting. The Mavic2 Pro had quite a bit of vignetting (caused by having a small lens).
The other thing I notice is that you probably don't want to go past f/7.1 on the Mavic3, as you start to get a lot of softening of the image because of diffraction. For example, f/11 is very soft, even in the center of the image.
If you want to look at the full size images yourself, I've put them on a Google Drive.
My overall conclusion is that the Mavic3's main lens/camera combo is plenty good enough to take excellent image quality photos. What limitations there are can be worked around for great results.
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