Top pick
This drone offers impressive value, combining the 360-degree obstacle avoidance of the more expensive DJI Mavic 3 Pro with two fantastic cameras.
The DJI Air 3 is the best drone for budding aerial photographers and videographers because of its automated obstacle avoidance, two high-quality cameras, and overall ease of use. Although our upgrade pick, the DJI Mavic 3 Progives you even better camera quality and battery life, the Air 3 is impressive enough to please most people—for half the price.
It avoids obstacles with ease. The Air 3 can detect obstacles as they approach—from any direction—and then make flight-path adjustments to avoid them. When we deliberately tried to fly the Air 3 straight at a tree or slam it into the ground, the drone emitted a loud beep and stopped itself or simply continued around the obstacle.
This 360-degree obstacle avoidance also allows for a more robust ActiveTrack feature, which directs the drone to follow a subject or yourself. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but in our testing it never ended up running the drone sideways into a tree (which has been known to happen with previous models).
In general, obstacle sensing removes stress from the flying experience, both when you’re flying manually and when you’re using DJI’s preprogrammed or autonomous-flight options, which is why we’re so happy to see the tech trickle down from the Mavic Pro series.
The two-camera system is versatile and high-quality. The Air 3’s main camera has a 1/1.3-inch sensor, which is smaller than that of its predecessor, the Air 2S (and the same size as the sensors on the Mini 3, Mini 3 Pro, and Mini 4 Pro). But it still manages to get dynamic, high-quality footage. Its lens also has a larger, f/1.7 aperture, letting in more light than the Air 2S to capture sharp, well-stabilized 4K video at up to 100 frames per second. It grabs good-looking 20-megapixel stills, too.
The 70mm-equivalent telephoto camera is mounted just above the main camera and has the same 1/1.3-inch sensor but a smaller, f/2.8 aperture. That camera doesn’t capture as much detail in low light as the main camera does, but its longer focal length provides additional flexibility in shot composition and can give you a different look than drone videographers have grown used to with models in this price range.
In our tests, the Air 3’s video was crisp, without any post-shoot color-balancing required, though we still preferred the colors that came out of the Mavic 3 Pro’s Hasselblad camera.
It handles gusty conditions with aplomb. While flying in winds measured at about 14 mph, the Air 3 was unfailingly stable. It didn’t drift, and it consistently recorded steady video, even when it rose above the tree line or dealt with unpredictable wind shear coming off mountain peaks.
Other, comparably sized DJI drones we tested performed similarly, but every Mini-series drone was more affected by wind. Like many drones, the Air 3 uses a combination of Galileo, GPS, and BeiDou satellites, as well as its vision cameras, to monitor movement and altitude changes.
The battery lasts long enough. With a stated battery life of up to 46 minutes—a claim that seemed accurate, as we found in our testing—the Air 3 can fill its 8 GB of internal memory space with video footage well before it’s forced to land for a swap. And that means you’ll probably want to add a microSD card for most flights.
DJI’s automated-flight modes are great (in certain situations). Of the handful of modes, we most often used ActiveTrack, which is good enough to stay with a walking subject, occasionally has trouble keeping up with a subject on a bike, and tends to get left behind by anything faster than that.
In QuickShots mode, the Air 3 can autonomously film elaborate cinematic shots, such as circling around a subject or zooming away from it. A mode called MasterShots combines several filming effects and then creates a short video for you. It wasn’t particularly useful in our testing, but it might be instructive for newer pilots familiarizing themselves with the visual vocabulary of drone cinematography.
It’s compact and lightweight. The Air 3 measures 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches when folded—about the size of a large coffee thermos—and weighs 1.5 pounds. The RC 2 controller that comes with it in DJI’s Fly More Combo is a little bigger than a slice of bread and about twice as thick. You can slip both into a camera bag easily or stow them in a purse or backpack.
It has great range. The Air 3 is capable of flying up to 12 miles away, though federal regulations say that you must keep a drone within your line of sight, so it’s safe to say that you’ll rarely test that range. It transmits video and remote-controller data via DJI’s OccuSync 4.0 system, which we’ve found to be reliable.
DJI’s controller software is robust. You can use DJI’s Fly app—which comes ready to use on the RC 2 controller—for drone calibration, camera settings, GPS maps, and intelligent flight modes. It also tracks all of your flight information (which you can replay if you’re trying to repeat a shot), warns you about any flight restrictions in the area, and offers built-in video-editing tools, which you can use on the controller itself or through the mobile app on your phone.
The controller is easy to use. In our tests, the drone responded nimbly to our commands, even while flying in its faster and more agile Sport mode. We also had no difficulty adjusting the tilt of the drone’s camera with the controller’s built-in wheel and pressing the dedicated buttons that prompt the camera to take a picture or start filming.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
- Like other Chinese brands, DJI has come under scrutiny from the US government and security researchers regarding security concerns. In addition, Android users have to download the DJI Fly app from DJI’s website instead of the Google Play store. We’ve included a few notes about the security and privacy of DJI drones below.
- The Air 3 has a smaller camera sensor than the Mavic 3 Pro does, and it’s also smaller than that of the Air 2S. Its videos looked sharp enough for posting to YouTube and social media, but the Mavic 3 Pro’s videos looked even clearer, with better colors.
- This drone quickly uses up its 8 GB of internal storage when shooting at its highest resolutions. That isn’t a major concern since high-capacity microSD cards are plentiful and cheap. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have a bit more built-in storage for those occasions when, say, you hike 2 miles to a spot you want to film only to realize that you left your memory card in another drone back in the car.
