DJI Mavic Mini: a $399 Drone that Packs a Punch (Quick Review)

This is the dji mavic mini. The price is going to be changing, especially with the release of the second one, but i’ll be putting up the price and the link to the drone in the description. But this thing is positively tiny. It fits into the palm of your hand – and i consider this such a vast improvement over the smaller, cheaper drones that i think it’s definitely worth looking into so what’s. The big headline well it’s very light right, it’s, 249 grams. This was a not an accidental weight. The dji came up with 249 skirts under the 250 gram limit that exists in a lot of jurisdictions. Laws are constantly changing, they’re being updated, so if you’re traveling be sure to look up the local laws, regardless of how light or heavy your drone is and regardless of whether you’re certified or not, it is very important to just exercise common sense decency. Don’T fly too close to people don’t disturb wildlife, don’t put anyone or yourself in danger. So what else is good about it? Well, it actually has on board storage. Not all small drones have on board storage. It has a on board micro sd card okay, so i use 128 gigabyte. One lasts you a very long time with this drone, even if you’re shooting 2.7 k video one of the great things is the long battery life of this drone. Now i believe, dji says the drone has a 30 or 31 minute battery life now, in practice with some wind and some messing around you’re going to get around, i think, closer to 25 to 26 minutes of flight time up her battery.

But that is an absolutely phenomenal amount of flight time. Okay, if you get the fly more combo, you do get the rapid charger station from dji. You can charge all three batteries uh very quickly through a usb connection. You just press the button on the side and gives you an update of the charge levels of the batteries. Okay, they do deplete over time, but it’s not too bad just charge them up the night before or the morning of your flight and you’re good to go slot it in here. Okay and the 249 weight by the way, 249 grams includes the battery uh. The memory card – i do not believe it includes this protective gimbal cover and it does not include the propeller guards. Okay. So if you want to be uh on the right side of the law, you can’t really add too much to the drone. At this point i mean you can add a very light filter to the lens. Well, we’ll talk about that in a bit. You press this button once and then you press it long press and the drone starts and it’s ready to fly so within 10 seconds. I have the drone up. This is the controller right here that the drone comes with okay fold. This guy out also very compact. These little joystick handles get stowed away here. You connect them like this controller works, the exactly the same way you press this button and you press it again, and the controller is up so in about 30 seconds provided there’s a nice flat surface, i can have the drone ready to fly, which is pretty crazy.

Considering the capabilities of this little thing, okay, the antennas here and to turn it off works exactly the same way, quick press it again, it’s off unscrew. These guys for storage and dji does give you a couple extras. If you get the fly more combo and you do get various types of cables, this is a lightning port cable. I’M. I fly the drone with my iphone, but right now, i’m, using my iphone to record the video, but it also comes with a usbc micro usb. So, just about any smartphone, you get the drone the controller and the battery hub that’s, literally, all you need to fly. This is a fast little drone in regular mode. It goes eight meters per second max speed, which is 28 kilometers per hour and in sport mode. It goes up to 13 meters per second 46 kilometers per hour. Now you wouldn’t be getting very good quality video in sport mode, because it’s just going way too fast and the video is going to come out choppy and jittery there’s, also a slower cinematic mode, which slows the drone down to get you even better shots than in Normal mode, so the lens is a 24 millimeter equivalent, okay, so it’s a pretty wide view and focuses from one meter all the way out to infinity. This drone actually takes optional, clip on filters that you can put on the camera. I don’t personally use them, but you can put circular polarizers nd filters on here.

If you have an exact shot lined up, and you know what you’re doing with nd filters and polarizers, i think it could be a good creative tool, but i don’t think it’s strictly necessary it’s a three axis gimbal, very steady video. I can also be controlled with the controller to face all the way down. This is a one over 2.3 inch sensor kind of the sensor from the compact cameras – 12 megapixels uh, but mostly we’re in it, for the video right. So it shoots up to 2.7 k. Video, i tend to shoot it at 1080p as a photographer. It really it’s really annoying how dji did not enable raw photos now that’s, probably just the software limitation they imposed. There was no need to limit that capability, but that was just a way for them to differentiate the product lineup. I guess there is no 4k video. As i said, it’s up to 2.7 k, i wouldn’t even be shooting 4k because i don’t have a computer that can reasonably edit 4k. I understand if you’re professional, it helps to have 4k not only for the resolution, but even if your output is going to be a lower resolution, you know you can do all sorts of panning or zooming in if you just have more information to work with the Biggest weakness of this drone guys is the fact that it’s on a wi fi connection, it is not using dji’s ocusync technology, even the mavic dji mavic mini 2 guys has the dji ocusync technology, which would greatly expand the range of this drone because, as it stands Now, there’s a lot of interference from other networks and urban environments.

So, if you’re in a city, the actual range of this drone, i think, is uh nowhere near the theoretical limit of four kilometers i’m personally, not comfortable flying it more than 700 meters away. I try to stay within 500 meters uh. You know, partly because i don’t want to lose line of sight of the drone. Yeah i’ve had connectivity issues with this drone flying it around the riverbend, for example, where i lost line of sight and then the drone was actually temporarily lost connection, so i had to walk or rather run towards where i thought the drone would be, and the connection Was reestablished? Drone is also like all dji drones, limited by dgi’s restricted zones. Now this is not really a fault of dgi. This is dgi uh, you know complying with government and local laws and regulations. The drone does not have any obstacle avoidance guys i mean it. Has sensors at the bottom here so it knows when it’s close to the ground, but in terms of side to side forward or back, there is no obstacle avoidance. Likewise, there is no follow mode for this drone that’s more of a creative limitation. I think you can get around the lack of raw photo limitation by shooting multiple shots, because you are able to control the exposure compensation. So if you shoot a shot at a normal ev and then maybe minus one ev and then plus one ev, you can stitch them together later in lightroom and get like an hdr picture it’s possible.

But i consider it to be a supreme waste of time. If you know, if we just had raw photo capability, we wouldn’t necessarily need to play these games and also there’s no guarantee that the drone will be stable. The main weakness of the mavic mini is wind resistance, so once the wind goes above a certain speed, you start to get high wind warnings and get quite nervous and bring it back, because i don’t want the wind to overpower it and carry it away, which is A huge risk, especially if you live near coastal areas – okay, even if the wind is not that strong on the beach, for example, once you take the drone up: 20 30, 40, 50 meters, things start to get quite windy and the whole thing the drone, the battery Pack, all that gets stored in this handy little case that you get when you buy the fly more combo okay battery hub in here, maybe another little box with some other accessories. The dji gives you like a screwdriver extra propellers extra, a joystick extra joysticks for the controller extra screws in case any any get loose, close up the case and it’s ready to put in a day pack or a travel pack, and you can easily travel with it. Keep in mind, i am a novice drone pilot i’m, not a professional, even with very basic skills and a bit of practice. I was able to get footage that i’m quite happy with you know you can cheat a bit by shooting at sunset or sunrise the golden hour that photographers know and love, because you’re just going to get that softer warmer light and everything is going to look more Glorious, i tend to shoot all my footage at 1080p.

30 fps. You know i like to save bandwidth and space on my memory card. I use auto exposure, no filters, maybe some exposure compensation adjustment if the situation calls for it like, for example, if the sun is very bright or if the water or snow is very reflective underneath if we think of dgi as kind of the apple of consumer drones. This this would be an ipad okay. If the mavic air is literally like the macbook air and the mavic pro is the macbook pro okay, this is the ipad of drones, it’s, a stripped down version of their flagship product, but it’s good enough for most people and it’s, certainly good enough for me. Now do i wish i had the mavic mini 2 yeah. I do because you know it has a lot of the stuff that’s missing from this one like most, notably ocusync, a whole bunch of other new features. I think dji realized that they really should start cannibalizing themselves before any potential competition shows up. But this you know the release of the mavic mini 2 greatly pushes down the cost of this little guy that’s, one good thing it has going for it and on these really should be plummeting in price on the used market. Now, if you need a drone, for you know super professional purposes like you’re doing commercial shooting, maybe you’re starting a real estate, photography, videography business – i would say the minimum drone you should be getting.

Is the mavic air? Okay, because that one gives you more information to work with and the videos are going to be more conducive to color grading and things like that. So if you’re planning to actually color correct your videos apply some kind of special effects to them and whatnot. Maybe it might be worth it to get a mavic air, 2 or mavic pro, but for people like me, who you know just do basic magic wand, style, editing in imovie or you know, extremely basic cuts and transitions at the mavic mini is more than enough. Okay. I’M, not planning to do any color grading. I mean you can absolutely color grade this footage, nothing wrong with that! It’S. Just that you know it helps to have more of bitrate more information in your files. When you do that, and so you may want to upgrade to something like the mavic air or mavic pro dji’s main goal was to get it under 250 grams and if you think about just how much technology they’ve packed into a drone that fits into the palm Of your hand, weighs under 250 grams and you can purchase with the fly more combo for under 500 bucks. These days, i think it’s, quite marvelous, just imagine having this kind of technology in your hands 10 years ago. Uh, you know i i would have laughed it’s kind of the minimum viable drone. Okay, when you compare it to the telo there’s, absolutely no comparison, it’s a lot better and when you compare it to the more expensive drones i mean it is less capable but it’s also a lot less expensive.

I think for the vast majority of hobbyist users or people like me who don’t fly the drone every day who may fly it once a week, maybe once a month more often when i’m traveling. This is a good enough. Drone it’s compact. It goes with you anywhere. If you really don’t care about video or photo – and you just want to fly a quadcopter in your apartment and get the dji tello – i have a video about that. But if you do want to take a stunning video create some memories. I think this is the cheapest drone you should be looking at. Let me know what you think in the comments.