Hi everybody,
I just joined here and just passed my Part 107. I live in the east coast of the U.S. and I am interested in starting a business providing real estate photography, arial mapping, and 3D imaging, eventually moving into thermal imaging.
My question is since I'm just starting out, in your professional experience which drone do you suggest for real estate photography, mapping and 3D imaging, the
Mavic 2 Pro or the
Phantom 4 Pro?
I know that I probably will not be able to do the thermal part with the
MP2 but it is a service I plan on offering after a while. Thank you.
It all depends upon how serious you are. Mavic
2s and Phantom 4s are high end consumer products as well as entry level professional tools, offering good professional level results for the price.
Some other questions to think about are what level of detail do you need to capture? Stills or video? Slow motion or other special effects work? Range and endurance needs? Flight in adverse or hazardous environments ie chemicals, heat, strong EM fields, etc?
The
Mavic 2 Enterprise sUAS is a good system, both as a starter kit as well as for use in confined spaces due to its small footprint in flight and portability. It can perform a variety of tasks very well, offers excellent (though not top-of-the-line) optics, is speedy, nimble and offers excellent endurance.
That being said, some pros like the Phantom IV Pro better for mapping due to its manual shutter and non-warped periphery of its images (this issue has been largely resolved in the Mavic
2s with additional firmware upgrades since that UAV was released).
If you have extensive UAV flying experience as well as can forecast a fairly large cash flow for your business with the use of high end UAVs, buying an Inspire or Matrice aircraft may be the better option. Keep in mind that you are looking at $6000 - >$20000, depending on the optics and kit that you buy with those aircraft, but they are both top of the line with the additional advantage of being able to change out sensor payloads tailored for specific operations.
In my opinion, the Inspire or Matrice would probably be overkill for mapping or aerial surveying operations and the M2E or
P4P will do just fine and cost a lot less. The Inspire or Matrice could - and I do stress COULD - offer some benefit for high end real estate filming, though, if your client is just going to upload the footage onto YouTube or similar streaming video platform, this erodes virtually all the benefits of buying one of these high end aircraft. Most of the video improvement for such a situation could be done post production in Premiere or similar video editing software.
Those are just my thoughts......
