With the recent announcement of the new DJI Mavic 3, one of the big selling points was that new dual-camera system. The main camera is a 20-megapixel 4/3 CMOS sensor with a variable f/2.8-11 aperture and a 24mm equivalent focal length. The secondary camera is a 12-megapixel 1/2″ CMOS sensor with a 162mm equivalent lens and a fixed f/4.4 aperture.
DJI combines these two cameras allowing for a hybrid zoom system. But is it really all it’s cracked up to be? Especially when that second camera only shoots jpg and not RAW or DNG? Well, the folks at DroneXL posted a video that shows how it really looks to zoom on the DJI Mavic 3. And, it’s not amazing, but it’s pretty impressive.
To create the hybrid zoom, the drone essentially uses digital zoom on the wide 24mm equivalent camera to scale up the view until it approximately matches the native field of view of the secondary camera. Then it switches to the secondary camera and digital zoom is used to scale that up, too. You can see the obvious artifacting of a scaled-up digital image in the video example above, but it does seem to be quite good.
With products like Topaz Gigapixel AI on the market, though, if you’re not in a rush and you have the time to resize it in post, you might be better off doing that than trying to do it in-camera for the best final result.
Set to their native resolutions without any zooming, though, the footage looks very impressive. I can’t wait to see what kinds of things people shoot with the Mavic 3 once it becomes available!
[via DroneXL]
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