DJI Mavic Air Review

The 3-Minute DJI Mavic Air Review

DJI’s Best Drone Yet?

By Graeme Messina | January 27, 2019

The Specifics:

Features & Design: 4/5 ● Performance: 4/5 ● Value: 4/5 ● Sound Quality 4/5

The Best:

Drones are not the strange oddity that they once were, with widespread mainstream adoption having firmly cemented their place in the enthusiast and professional markets alike. This is a small, lightweight unit that has excellent image capabilities, awesome speed and very good flight time with obstacle avoidance. It is really small, measuring at 3.2” inches wide x 6.6” inches long and 1.9” inches tall.

The Bugs:

Some might have preferred there to be more than the stripped down collision avoidance systems that this unit comes with, as it currently only avoids objects with a two-way avoidance system. Because of its smaller size it can be tricky to spot from longer distances, but that is what the onboard camera is for.

Is it for you?

This lightweight, small footprint drone is not only agile and maneuverable, but it also has one of the best drone cameras attached to it. The quality images and video that this drone can produce totally blows the Mavic Pro out of the water, which is impressive to say the least considering just how small this little flier is. If you need a small device that is compact, light and has excellent video capabilities, then this is the drone for you.

Meet the DJI Mavic Air

It’s not just the drone itself that is compact and foldable, the remote is also highly compact and can be folded into a small little device that is easily transported and carried around with you. The remote control has a universal smartphone holder that can accommodate most smart phones, as your phone acts as the main heads up display for your flying efforts.

What we like

We like that this drone is able to take such stellar video while remaining highly agile and maneuverable in the air, with a respectable flight time of just over 20 minutes. While that is not as long as last year’s Mavic Pro could achieve, this is still a respectable amount of time to stay in the air for such a small drone.

It has a far better camera than the Mavic Pro, and can shoot slow motion clips at 120FPS, and can also shoot video at 4K. It has as wide camera angle and is great for capturing landscapes and other scenery.

This is a better drone than the Mavic Pro in most respects, and is a worthy successor to the Mavic range of drones.

What we don’t like

There really isn’t too much that can be said about this drone that would affect the way in which it has been received thus far by enthusiasts in the drone world. Perhaps the need to buy additional batteries, and some software niggles involving the compass calibration are about the only reported bugs on this model, but software updates will fix those.

Should you buy it?

If you travel and space is a premium, then this drone will make a lot of sense for you, especially if you enjoy taking to the air and capturing decent high quality 4K video. The drone responds well to controls, has collision detection built in, and performs very well when comparing it to older models. This is a good choice as an upgrade and will make most drone enthusiasts very happy indeed.