Drone review: DJI Mavic Air 2
DJI’s latest drone makes a signi cant step up from the original Mavic Air. Angela Nicholson checks it out
Thanks to its attractive price, small size, ease of use and decent image quality, the original DJI Mavic Air was a popular drone for first-time pilots. Since then, however, DJI has introduced the Mavic Mini which at 40x82x57mm (when folded) and 249g is a lot smaller and lighter than the Air.
Rather than crowd the smaller end of the market, DJI has decided to make the Mavic Air 2 bigger, beefier and a bit more serious than the original Air. Consequently, at 570g the Mavic Air 2 is noticeably heavier than the original Mavic Air (430g), and when it’s folded it measures 180x97x84mm rather than 168x83x49mm, but it’s still conveniently portable. Most importantly, the 12MP sensor in the new drone is a 1/2-inch CMOS device rather than a 1/2.3-inch chip, which should be good news for image quality.
Getting started
Before you can fly the Mavic Air 2 you need to unfold the arms and mount the propellers. These attach easily with a bayonet mount but it’s vital that the right propellers are on the right arms as they work in matched pairs and are marked accordingly.
You also need to download the DJI Fly app to your smartphone and create a DJI account. Then, after charging the controller and the drone battery, connect your phone to the controller using the appropriate supplied cable. It’s best to do all the preparation somewhere with a decent Wi- Fi signal because once the controller and drone are powered up and connected wirelessly, there are firmware updates to download. With that done, put a microSD card in the drone’s slot, format it via the app and attach the two control sticks to the controller. You’re now ready to turn everything off again, fold up the drone arms and head to your take- off point.
Take- o
Once the drone is prepared for flight and connected to the controller, the DJI Flight app takes you through some pre-flight checks to make sure that everything is safe. With that done you’re ready to take to the air.
If you’re new to flying, I recommend keeping the controller’s flight mode switch set to ‘ Tripod’ or ‘Normal’ mode. ‘Sport’ mode speeds things up dramatically, so it’s handy if you want to ascend or descend the drone quickly, but it’s best to treat it with caution in the early days. Also, if you’re shooting video, slow and steady usually produces more watchable footage.
The Mavic Air 2 has object avoidance sensors that point forwards, backwards and downwards. They work well but it’s important to bear in mind that there are no sensors on the sides or top of the drone, which means there’s nothing to stop you flying sideways into objects or colliding with overhead objects like tree branches.
Photography and videography
The gimbal-mounted camera has a 24mmequivalent f/2.8 lens and exposure can be set automatically or manually, but the aperture is fixed. Sensitivity can be set in the range ISO 100- 6400 for stills or video, but with an aperture of f/2.8 there’s not much need to push the value up in normal flying conditions.
Although the sensor is a 12MP device, there’s a high-resolution mode that creates 48MP images. It takes few seconds to create the images (you can capture both raw and JPEG files), but the results are worth it.
While you can take full control over the flight of the Mavic Air 2, there’s a collection of easy-to-use QuickShot modes (Dronie, Circle,
Helix, Rocket, Boomerang and Asteroid) that enable you to capture great-looking smooth footage automatically. FocusTrack, which comprises Active Track 3.0, Spotlight 2.0 and Point of Interest (POI) 3.0 also help to keep your subject in the frame and they work brilliantly.
Both the stills and video from the Mavic Air 2 show an improvement over the results from the original Mavic Air. The 4K footage looks great, but the D- Cinelike profile is useful if you want to grade footage. Meanwhile, the stills have a good level of detail although the JPEGs look over sharpened at close quarters. It’s also important to keep an eye on the position of the sun as there can be some strong flare artefacts.