 I'm back on the channel which just means one thing. It's time for a new drone review. We're looking at DJI's Mavic Air 2. So DJI says the Mavic Air 2 is their smartest and safest drone to date which is great but the thing that I care about the most is pure image quality. So we'll be taking a closer look at that but there's so much to go through that we should just get going. The Mavic Air 2 looks like a smaller Mavic 2 Pro and a bigger Mavic Mini. It's slightly bigger and slightly heavier than the original Mavic Air but still portable enough to bring around. I do have to say I prefer the look of the Mavic Air 1. I always thought that design looked really nice and it's a little bit more fun. Came out in three colors and I always thought the gray housing on these is just a little boring. But at least all the Mavic drones that DJI is offering now they have a unified look in this lineup. Another big change and I do mean big is the new controller. It's almost twice the size of any other DJI controller excluding the optional 749 smart controller. This one doesn't have a screen and there are no visible antennas sticking out. The phone holder is moved to the top and it's spring-loaded. I think the whole design makes a lot more sense even though it sacrifices the size. It's also a lot more comfortable to hold too. If I were to nitpick my only wish is for the custom function buttons to be at the bottom of the controller instead of the front of it. The most important thing for me is that the new Mavic Air has a larger half an inch sensor that's capable of shooting 4k 60 frames per second and also 12 megapixel photos and 48 megapixel photos. Compared to other standard sensor sizes this is still a tiny sensor. It's only a little bit bigger than the original Mavic Air had and it's a fraction of the size of an APS-C sensor which you find in most mirrorless cameras. So just know you gotta adjust your expectations here. So what that means to you a drone photographer is that you can take photos with a lot more detail or you know photos with lower resolution but a bit more dynamic range. If we take a look at the two JPEGs that we get from the drone. Now these are not RAWs just JPEGs that you get on your phone. It does look like the photo on the right the 48 megapixel one was struggling to keep the details in the highlights compared to the 12 megapixel version one. I do think this might be on DJI's JPEG processing so that could get fixed with an update. But if we take a look at the RAW photos in Lightroom I'll go ahead and crank up the shadows and pull the highlights in post so you basically end up with two very very similar photos. You do lose a little bit of information the highlights in the top right corner and I do see some purple color casting happening in the bottom right and left corners too and yes before you say anything I'm fully aware that I'm pixel peeping here but I just want to point out that the 12 megapixel photos they look better to me. If you need 48 megapixel photos for larger prints or anything like that you'll be happy that it's there and it looks good. Alright moving on to Smart Photo. It's a debut feature for DJI and it's one of those things that makes this drone the smartest drone they've made. It's in the name. So what it basically does is scene recognition. So depending on what the drone is pointing at like trees, snow, sunrise, sunset, or low light it'll adjust settings accordingly. The thing is it doesn't really tell you what it's doing and when so you just kind of have to trust it. Here's some normal and smart jpegs. There's not much that set these apart but in a way I'm glad the differences are subtle and not something that looks over processed. There does seem to be just a bit more luminance in the greens here and if you look at the shadows at the bottom of the photo you can see a little bit more contrast there too which I like. And sunrises do look better here just by leveling the highlights and shadows without looking too mushy or too HD already. Finally for photo section let's run through a quick noise comparison. So we have six photos here ranging from 100 ISO all the way to 6400 ISO. And yes the noise handling in these is pretty solid. 800 ISO is probably as high as I would go. If you switch to smart mode while shooting in low light you can see in the metadata the drone has a bit more control over ISO capping it at 540 lowering the shutter speed cleaning up some noise and coming out with nice results. Again it's nothing too drastic but just enough to make this mode a worthwhile addition to this drone and honestly one of the better drones for photography overall. The Mavic Air 2 can film 4k 60 with 120 megabits per second bitrate. It can shoot slow-mo footage up to 240 frames per second at 1080p and it can shoot in three color spaces normal, center-like and HDR. I'm usually not the biggest fan of HDR it tends to be just like an over-processed mess but I feel like companies are getting it right more and more and DJI is one of them too. So one of the biggest downsides with all drones in general is that they use tiny sensors that tend to show a lot of noise even at 100 ISO and at 800 it's basically unusable. The half an inch sensor here does help with noise reduction but it's still not you know mind-blowing footage so let's take a look at some of it. So I'm looking at a couple of clips here which are shot at 100, 400, 800 and so forth. You can see that when we reach 400 you already start losing a bit of color and you already start losing a bit of contrast too. It just becomes a little too noisy for my taste. Even some clips that I saw 100 didn't really look that great in standard color profile but once you switch to center-like if you're down to do that you can easily crush the blacks, eliminate a lot of this unwanted noise even without any noise reduction. Overall this is a big step up from the Mavic Air obviously and if you're down to use center-like and spend more time editing your footage you'll be pretty happy with the results. Lastly hyperlapse mode can now render out 8k exports which is great but the issues that I had with hyperlapse mode in the past are still here. Most of the times you have to stabilize the footage in premiere or after effects and most of the time those experts have some kind of a shift in exposure which really ruins the whole experience. Okay there are a few caveats when it comes to hyperlapses though. Not all modes can shoot 8k right now. DJI says they'll be adding them and should have you completed by the end of June. You don't actually get jpegs and ross for the 8k exports which is kind of a bummer. Next one is the minimal interval that you can have between shots is six seconds which to me in the final export just looks a little too fast. You can't actually get the 8k exports on your phone you have to transfer them on your computer first and then the last one is well the ones that I did actually came out corrupted. It worked on some of the other computers but it didn't work on mine. So yeah looks like hyperlapse mode still needs a little bit of work done. So the Mavic Air 2 comes with front rear and bottom sensors for obstacle detection, new and improved APES for obstacle avoidance, 34 minutes of battery time and ditches enhanced wi-fi for OcuSync 2 which is probably the main reason why you want to upgrade from let's say the original Mavic Air. Now as far as the distance goes I couldn't really max out that in the city for obvious reasons. But what I will say is that OcuSync really provides a stable transmission and I've rarely ever had any dropouts during all of my flights. Now when it comes to battery I didn't really get the full 34 minutes of flight time because you do need to save up a little bit of battery for landing and getting the drone back in time. But during my test in which was a very windy San Francisco so you expect the drone to just kind of fight the wind and you don't want to get hit by a drone. So I did get around 28 minutes of flight time but on average I would get around 25 minutes which is still pretty darn good. As far as follow me modes go I'll be honest those are not my priority and I've rarely ever used them in real world situations but from a few tests I did I'm starting to believe DJI's claim that this is their smartest drone so far. It was better at keeping me in focus despite losing me instantly in this very first test I'll give them pass on that one and overall it felt like it was less jittery than the previous models including the Mavic Air 2 Pro. Same goes with APAS I'm glad it's still here and I'm glad it's getting better but is it incomparable to Skydio? No not really and that's due to the fact that the Mavic Air 2 doesn't really have 360 omni-directional sensing around it but it does give you and everyone else around you that little bit extra layer of protection too. DJI's Mavic Air 2 is a significant upgrade from the Mavic Air it even does some things better than their flagship Mavic 2 Pro but I can't shake off this feeling that this is sort of an iterative even slightly boring upgrade. Yes everything is better but it's not the same as the Mavic Air 2 everything is as much improved as it should be but I think maybe I was expecting more. DJI has been hesitant to creep into Skydio's territory when it comes to obstacle avoidance and autonomous flying even though the Mavic Air 2 has some better options than its predecessor it's still far from what Skydio offers. I also wish there was more evidence of Hasselblad's color science in photos and videos too. All that said the Mavic Air 2 is the drone I'd recommend to most amateurs and expert flyers looking to get good enough videos and some of the best photos out there. So good job DJI you made another good drone. Shocking. Alright everybody thank you so much for watching and let me know in the comments which drone are you flying right now are you looking to upgrade and which one are you looking to upgrade to? Is it the Air? Is it the Pro? Is it the Mini? Let me know.