Air drone with in-built automatic videoing

The foldable DJI Mavic Air is a meticulously engineered drone packed with advanced photography features that doesn’t break the budget.

Foldability means it uses little room in a backpack. It takes 12-megapixel stills and ultra-high definition 4K video and 2.7K video in slow motion. You get a bitrate of up to 100 megabits per second.

It has an in-built array of automatic video shooting sequences that means even amateurs can create videos with motion-picture style flying sequences. In short, it’s precisely the drone that many people will want, and in my view it should be a success.

You’ve got to hand it to DJI. The Shenzhen company has licked the serious competition in the proconsumer drone space. It’s main rival that started the ­consumer drone craze, France’s Parrot, laid off a third of its staff a year ago due to falling revenue. Yet DJI continues to expand its drone arsenal.

Parrot still sells interesting drones, such as the fixed-wing Disco that soars across the sky like an Eagle, but DJI offers so much quality and choice.

What makes Mavic Air attractive, is that at $1299, it’s a great compromise. In DJI’s marketplace, it sits between the entry- level DJI Spark ($649) and the more expensive Mavic Pro ($1599), another foldable drone.

But the compromises aren’t deal breakers. The Air actually has more camera-shooting options than Mavic Pro and is even smaller when you fold it. If you need the ultimate DJI flying experience with high-end photography, then you pay $1899 upwards for ­Phantom series drones, but they are not foldable like the Mavics.

The fun begins when you take Mavic Air out of its zip-up case. It weighs just 430 grams and feels so light. From there it takes just a few seconds to rotate the arms tucked in at the sides and click them into place for flying. The gimbal is housed internally, so all you need do is remove its cover. Clip in a battery and it’s almost ready to fly. You also need to install and run the DJI Go 4 app.

You can fly the drone using your phone directly, in which case the range is dependent on the strength of your phone’s Wi-Fi signal. Or you can clip the phone into the supplied controller and use its Wi-Fi link to the drone. It took me a couple of goes to link the drone and controller but it worked eventually.

You can also fly Mavic Air using hand gestures, as you can the DJI Spark, but this is a novelty feature.

The controller is designed to be compact. The antennas fold away, and the thumbsticks are stowed inside the side arms. DJI has a flight simulator that lets you try the controller before actually flying. It’s worth doing.

Flying range is less than the Mavic Pro controller, which uses a radio link to the drone. DJI cites up to 4km. Frankly, if you are flying legally, you won’t need 4km as CASA rules require line-of-sight flying.

The piece de resistance is the Air’s QuickShot intelligent video modes. These automatically ­create video sequences you’d be proud to include in your footage.

With Mavic Pro there was rocket, dronie, circle, or helix ­motion. In dronie mode, it takes video as it travels backwards and upwards away from you. In helix mode it flies around you in a circle, gradually getting further away. In rocket mode, it ascends vertically up leaving you as a small dot below.

DJI has added two new modes with Mavic Air. Asteroid is the most spectacular. The world around you is shown as a little ball in the sky, which expands and ­rotates and until it zooms down on you. Boomerang mode, as you’d expect, is a view of you as if taken from a boomerang in an elongated elliptical orbit above you.

DJI says the drone can stitch together 25 photos to create a 32-megapixel panoramic image in one minute.

The basic obstacle detection on Mavic Pro has been replaced with a more extensive one that senses obstacles up to 20 metres away. The drone flies around them or over them.

The camera has a 1:2.3-inch CMOS sensor rather than the larger 1-inch sensor on the Phantom 4 Pro.

The biggest issue facing drone users is not the drones themselves, but the issue of where you can fly them. The CASA smartphone app tells you where flying restrictions apply and what the rules are, but you will need to check the rules of local councils and park authorities.

In Sydney these days, there are few places left to fly in the metropolitan area, so don’t buy a drone unless you’re willing to travel to use it. If you do, consider buying several spare batteries and a car charger, otherwise you’ll be travelling long distances for just 20 minutes of fun.

It’s not all bad news. You can fly drones in some Brisbane parks, and near a few sections of Sydney eastern beaches, and you can fly drones in NSW national parks if you have the consent of a park area manager. You need to plan ahead.

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