Review: DJI Air 3S

As a UK resident currently without the certificate, I had to be quite careful where I flew the Air 3S. Living on the coast at least meant I was able to fly it out over the sea, where it could easily be kept the requisite distance from people, buildings, parks, and beaches. If I lived in the middle of a large town or city here, however, I’d find the restrictions too frustrating to deal with and opt for an ultra-lightweight, fly-anywhere drone such as the DJI Mini 4 Pro. I suspect most casual drone users feel the same way.

Twice as Nice

Those who decide to pass the courses and deal with the paperwork will enjoy excellent rewards for their time, patience, and money. If the older Air 3’s camera performance was impressive, the Air 3S’s is stunning. The new 1-inch sensor delivers 14 stops of dynamic range and excels in challenging lighting, producing detail-rich, low-noise images at dusk and even at night. I shot the sample photos (above) in DNG RAW (the wide-angle camera shoots 50-megapixel stills; the telephoto 48-megapixel) and edited them using Adobe Lightroom, while the sample video was captured in 10-bit D-Log M and color graded and corrected with DaVinci Resolve Studio. I had a blast editing the footage, with the 10-bit original files offering a huge amount of scope to work with. You don’t have to shoot in D-Log M, however; the cameras support standard color profiles in both 8- and 10-bit quality and 10-bit HLG.

There’s a wide selection of superb video and photo options available. While the Air 3S can’t shoot 5.7K footage (something offered by the DJI Mavic 3 Pro), it can shoot regular 4K videos at up to 60 fps, 4K slow-motion clips at 120 fps and Full HD slow-motion clips at 240 fps. It can also shoot 9:16 portrait-format videos, ideal for quick posting to social media channels, at a more than acceptable 2.7K resolution and 60 fps.

I wouldn’t call the cameras perfect, of course. The lack of adjustable apertures makes a set of neutral density (ND) filters almost a compulsory purchase for anyone shooting video during the day, and even then, changing the filters is a fiddly process. Hopefully that’s one upgrade we’ll see DJI introduce with the Air 4, whenever it arrives.