DJI Mavic 2 Zoom

amazon DJI Mavic 2 Zoom reviews

DJI was the first name in the drone field, largely due to the success of its iconic Phantom line. But the Phantom’s rigid design has given way to the more modern, folding Mavic family. The first Mavic Pro made videographers rethink what a small Drone could do. Other small models have joined it, but the Mavic 2 represents DJI’s true successor to its flagship compact aircraft. There are two camera models — the Mavic 2 Zoom ($1,249), which we’re reviewing here, and the Mavic 2 Pro ($1,499), which doesn’t zoom but has a higher-quality camera.

Mavic is bigger

Tech upgrades are almost always about smaller, thinner variants of familiar devices. But not with the Mavic 2. The plane is slightly larger than the first Mavic Pro and the intermediate Mavic Pro Platinum. It measures 3.3 x 3.6 x 8.4 inches (HWD) with arms folded and 3.3 x 9.5 x 12.7 inches with arms extended and ready to fly and weigh approximately 2 pounds. Compare this to the original Mavic Pro, which measures 3.3 x 3.3 x 7.8 inches when folded and weighs 1.6 pounds. It’s heavy enough to require FAA registration for recreational use in the US.

Just because the Mavic 2 is bigger doesn’t mean it’s any less portable. I can still find a place for it in my camera bag, taking up the same space I normally reserve for a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens. If you want a smaller Drone with some zooming, don’t count on the Parrot Anafi. It’s more portable (2.5 x 2.6 x 9.6 inches) and lighter (11.3 ounces), but the Anafi’s construction doesn’t feel as sturdy as the Mavic. The Parrot Drone offers lossless digital zoom when recording at 1080p, but if you want lossless zoom when recording 4K.

Apart from the camera, the Mavic 2 Zoom is the same drone as the Mavic 2 Pro. Zoom uses a 1/2.3-inch image sensor with 12MP resolution, the same size you find in many smartphones, with a zoom range of 24-48mm (full-frame equivalent) and variable aperture. f/2.8-3.8. Mavic 2 Pro has a 1-inch sensor camera with 20MP resolution and an imaging surface four times the size of Zoom. The Pro’s lens is a 24mm f/2.8 fixed focal length.

The Mavic 2’s remote is a variation of what came from previous models. It comes in grey, with folding clips to hold your phone at the bottom and a detachable USB cable for connectivity. DJI includes an Apple Lightning, micro USB, and USB-C cable. This clip is slightly larger, so I can use my iPhone 8 Plus without removing its thin leather case, but larger ones won’t fit. It also has a cutout placed so you can more easily access the phone’s Home button when it’s docked to the remote. The controller is untwisted and stowed at the bottom, just like the Mavic Air.

The remote control itself has a monochrome display. It’s possible to drive the Mavic without your phone attached, just based on the information displayed there, but you won’t be able to see it from the camera, so that I wouldn’t recommend it. Mavic must be activated using the DJI Go 4 app (free download for Android and iOS) before a flight — a one-time request, but firmware updates are done through the app.

In addition to the flight controls, the remote includes some direct control via the camera. There’s a control wheel on the shoulder — the left adjusts the gimbal’s tilt, and the right set the zoom and dedicated buttons for taking photos or starting a video. A small joystick to the right of the info screen is used to lighten or darken your footage and images (EV offset), and the Pause button to the left stops the drone and puts it hovering in place. There’s a switch on the side to change airplane mode and a Home screen and Power button on the front. Finally, you get a few customizable buttons on the back (C1 and C2).

The Mavic 2’s battery is more powerful than the original, and DJI says the drone can fly for up to 31 minutes on a single full charge. The word “up to” is the keyword here—you can expect a full half-hour of hovering in place without much wind, but actual flying puts more strain on the battery. However, our field tests averaged 27 minutes of flight time per charge. It’s a few moments of shyness about DJI’s claims, but it represents a more typical experience.

DJI has pioneered the use of obstacle avoidance in its Drone line, and the Mavic 2 has a sensor that reads the entire world around it. The front, rear, top, and bottom sensors will freeze the drone in its path to prevent a collision. There are also left and right sensors, but they only work in a few different modes. They’re enabled in ActiveTrack, the automatic subject tracking mode, so you can let the Drone track you with confidence that it won’t blindly crash into walls or trees.

They are also enabled in Tripod mode, a low-speed setting that allows you to position the Mavic for aerial photography precisely. If you choose tripod mode instead of Tripod mode, the Mavic 2’s 45mph Sport mode, the sensors are completely disabled, so use it with care.

You get 8GB of internal storage with the Mavic 2, but when you consider it supports 100Mbps video recording, that’s not a ton of space — it should have less than 15 minutes of footage. You’ll want to add a microSD card to ensure you don’t run out of space before the battery runs out.

Benefits of Optical Zoom

The zoom lens is the reason to buy the Mavic 2 Zoom over the smaller, more affordable Mavic Air. It adds many desirable capabilities, the most obvious being changing the focal length while recording. The on-sensor phase-detection autofocus does a great job precisely keeping your video in focus, even when zooming in and moving the drone simultaneously.

You can make a dolly zoom shot — first used by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo — very easily. Zoom out while moving forward or zoom in while dragging backward. You will be able to make your shots with a disorienting effect where your subject remains the same size while the angle of view changes.

Another trick that zoom allows is what DJI calls Super Resolution photography. The Mavic 2 Zoom’s 12MP sensor manages its smartphone-level images. But with some help from the zoom lens, it can stitch multiple enlarged photos together to form a 48MP wide-angle image. It takes about 15 seconds to take a photo, and you can watch the drone as it works to capture each frame segment on your phone screen. I was quite pleased with the results – exposures were well balanced, even in scenes with mixed lighting, and I didn’t see any sign of distracting ghosting along the seams of the image. However, they are certainly a concern with any method of compositing panoramas. My big complaint is that this mode is only available when shooting JPG — I.’

Now, don’t forget that, although you will lose the ability to zoom while recording by choosing the Mavic 2 Pro instead of the Zoom style, you can still record 4K videos in two viewing angles with the Pro, one wide and tight tighter. Still, you’ll have to stop recording and start a new clip to make changes.

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DJI Go 4 Apps and Features

The Mavic 2 Zoom works with the DJI Go 4 App, a free download for Android or iOS. This app has some useful features beyond basic flight controls.

These include flight logging, access to automated shots, and Hyperlapse, among other things. Hyperlapse, a time-lapse with motion, works when the drone is hovering or in motion, but the flying experience isn’t great. The remote makes a fake shutter sound every time the drone takes a frame and adjusts the airspeed. The results are good, although you’ll need to spend a fair amount of time in the air to get one of these significant lengths. It’s an area where I enjoy flying the Parrot Anafi a bit more, as it shoots Hyperlapse video without distraction.

DJI loads up its Drones with multiple auto-battle modes. The Mavic 2 Zoom can fly in a perfectly circular orbit, combine panoramic images and videos to create beautiful Small Planet-like “Asteroids” footage, and identify and track objects with ActiveTrack. Other options include TapFly, which lets you control the drone by tapping your phone’s screen, automatic flight paths based on waypoints, and Boomerang shots that rotate around a subject while pulled out to reveal the environment, a good choice for selfies.

The app also helps you know about no-fly zones and prevents you from taking off in restricted airspace. DJI has made licensing easier for pilots with FAA Part 107 licenses with an automated unlocking process. DJI does its best to keep drone owners aware of permanent and temporary flight restrictions — the former for areas such as the airspace around Washington DC, and the latter often enacted in efforts to aerial firefighting force. But you should still be careful before you fly to make sure you’re legit — if something goes wrong, you’ll have to suffer.

The app also includes a world map, displayed in a picture-in-picture view that can be swapped with a live video feed. It adds a little extra safety when flying because even if you accidentally lose track of your drone, you still know where it is. It would help if you tried to keep the plane within your line of sight when flying, but the Mavic can fly very fast and very far. It transmits a 1080p signal back to the remote, and we experienced no drops or stutters during our testing.

Great video, good pictures

The Mavic 2 Zoom captures a sharp, colorful 4K video. The gimbal stabilization does a great job keeping things steady, even when the drone is moving, and the lens is zoomed in. There are several frame rates—you can shoot at 24, 25, or 30fps in 4K UHD quality. You’ll add 48, 50, and 60 fps by going down to 2.7K, and you can push it all up to 120 fps at 1080p (2K). Neither Mavic 2 models support the wider DCI 4K format — a surprising omission since it was included with the first Mavic Pro and the Mavic Pro Platinum.

There are several configurations available. Non-expert video editors will want to use one of the online-ready interfaces, but if you’re more experienced, you can use the flat D-Cinelike profile to create flat footage for a more dynamic range. However, you will need to apply color grading to make the flat footage look good. To get better video from a Drone, you need to switch to a larger sensor — the Mavic 2 Pro goes a bit further, capturing footage in the more powerful 10-bit format and offering Hybrid High Dynamic Range (HDR) Log-Gamma (HLG) takes over.

Mavic 2 Zoom supports HDR for still images. If you shoot in JPG mode with HDR enabled, it will combine multiple exposures to create better-looking photos. It is especially useful in situations with strong backlight or on days when the sky is a bit hazy. You can also take photos in Raw (DNG) format so that you can apply your adjustments.

Despite some help from the software, the Mavic 2 Zoom’s imaging engine doesn’t deliver significantly better results than the cheaper Drones. If you want a small drone with class-leading imaging capabilities, the Mavic 2 Pro is worth the extra cost.