For all intents and purposes, the $999.99 DJI Air 2S is last year’s Mavic Air 2 with an upgraded camera and obstacle sensors, expanded automatic camera movements, and the robust safety features and quality that have made DJI the market leader in aerial imaging. The larger camera sensor and 5.4K recording are worthwhile upgrades for professional photographers and videographers alike, though we think most pilots starting out with a drone will be just as happy with the Mavic Air 2 for $200 less, which is more of a crowd-pleaser and remains our Editors’ Choice winner. If you want more than 4K, however, the Air 2S is worth it.
A Mavic No More
This is the second drone release from DJI in a row to drop Mavic from the product name, so it’s safe to say the company is moving away from clever branding. Instead it gets right to the point here—this is the DJI Air 2S, a bit bigger than the DJI Mini 2, and with a different camera than the otherwise similar DJI Mavic Air 2. OK, so it’s still a bit confusing, but hopefully it will make more sense as DJI continues to update it naming conventions with future releases.
No matter what you call it, the Air 2S follows the Mavic playbook closely. It’s a small drone with folding arms, so it’s easier to find a place for it in your camera bag. It’s also pretty small, at just 3.3 by 3.8 by 7.1 inches (HWD) when folded, and about 1.3 pounds. The arms fold out in a jiffy, too.
The Air 2S is light enough to pick up and hold with one hand, and takes up just a little bit more room in a camera bag as a typical 24-70mm full-frame zoom. It’s not quite as tiny or light as the Mini 2, but it still easy to pack for a hike or trip.
It’s heavy enough to require FAA registration, though. If you’re flying for fun, a $5 fee covers any drones you own for three years. Pilots making money—whether it be for real estate, cinema production, or anything in between—are required to pass a certification exam.
DJI is selling it on its own for $999.99, or in a Fly More Combo for $1,299.99. The standard edition includes everything you need to get started—the drone, a flight battery, a remote control, and chargers. Fly More gets you two additional batteries, a multi-charger, a set of neutral density filters, and a carrying case.
Neither version ships with a memory card, but the drone does have some internal storage. It’s only 8GB, though, which fills up very quickly at 4K or 5.6K. It’s ample if you’re using the aircraft primarily for photography, but it’s just not enough for video. A microSD card is a necessary add-on, and I’d go for one with at least 64GB so you don’t have to worry about filling up the card—they’re not at all expensive. Still, we’re happy to see DJI include at least some internal storage.
A big card is especially useful given how long the Air 2S can stay aloft. Its battery is good for around a half hour—DJI rates it at 31 minutes—and you can expect to get within a couple minutes of that in real-world conditions. How you fly, wind, and other factors come into play, but our tests prove the half-hour estimate to be pretty accurate.
As for safety features, there are plenty. The Air 2S’s positioning system leverages GPS and GLONASS satellites, as well as visual sensors, to determine position and hover perfectly in place. It supports automated return to home and includes an obstacle avoidance system, as well as geofencing support.
DJI limits flight capabilities in areas where restrictions are in place. For more information on how this affects use where you live, refer to its Fly Safe site—it includes an interactive map, and also details the procedures pilots can use to unlock flights in certain zones.
Remote Control
DJI redesigned its flight remote last year for the Mavic Air 2 release, and the same remote is included here. It’s a rectangular, gray slab with removable control sticks, a number of camera and flight control buttons, and convenient USB-C charging.
The remote fits comfortably in your hand, not unlike a video game controller. It has a clip at the top to hold your smartphone—you’ll need it on to view and control camera settings. Both Android and iOS phones are supported, and the drone ships with short Lightning, micro USB, and USB-C cables to ensure compatibility with your device.
The clip is big enough to support larger handsets, and the remote charges your phone. These are welcome features, as the battery in my big iPhone 8 Plus doesn’t last as long as it did a few years ago.
Flying a drone is intuitive enough. You’ll need to make sure your phone is plugged in and loaded with the DJI Fly app, and that you install the two joysticks for flight control—they stow at the bottom of the remote when not in use. The left stick controls yaw and altitude, while the the right moves the drone forward, backward, left, or right in space. We’ve got a guide for first-time pilots to read, but if you’ve used any brand of drone before, you’ll feel right at home here.
The remote includes an emergency control button that can set the aircraft to hover in place with a short press, or automatically fly back to your position with a longer one. There’s a control wheel to set the camera tilt at the left bumper position and a video/photo button at the right.
A toggle at the center switches between slow (Cine), standard (Normal), and fast (Sport) flight modes. Cine and Normal are good choices for more elegant camera moves. If you turn the drone in the air when using either, the camera will stay perfectly smooth and level. With Sport mode the drone flies faster for video with more sense of motion—when you turn the drone, you get a banking, POV effect from video. It’s a good fit for action shots, but be careful to use it when you’re high enough to be above trees, as obstacle detection isn’t supported in Sport.
Overall, there’s not much missing from the remote. It doesn’t have its own screen, so you’ll need connect your phone for flight. If you want a drone that can be flown without a smartphone, take a look at the Autel EVO II series—we’re currently working on a review of the EVO Pro II, an $1,800 quadcopter with a similar camera to the Air 2S.
DJI Fly App
The DJI Fly app, a free download for Android and iOS devices, is a necessary download. It’s easy enough to set up—you’ll need to create a DJI account to activate the drone and give it the required permissions to access your phone’s camera roll, but it’s all painless.
The app shows the view from the drone’s camera, and gives you access to the Air 2S’s automated flight modes. It also displays a map that shows your position in the world, as well as the drone’s. The drone is represented by a blue arrow, and a floating red line is there to connect its position to where you’re standing, helpful if you lose track of the aircraft visually.
It’s here you can configure many esoteric settings—think of the app’s Settings page as the drone’s Menu button. The geofence is configurable here, you can swap between metric and imperial units, or add a framing overlay grid as a photographic composition aid.
You’ll also use the app to switch between different photo and video modes. For images the drone can shoot in JPG or Raw format, either in a basic mode or a Smart Photo scene recognition mode. The app also sets video resolution between 1080p, 2.7K, 4K, and 5.4K, adjusts frame rates, and changes the color profile.
A couple of features don’t work at 5.4K, or at 4K when pushing the frame rate beyond 30fps. Active Track, a flight mode that follows a subject as it moves, is one. APAS 4.0, the automatic obstacle avoidance system, is another. The drone will still use its sensors to prevent collisions at higher resolutions and frame rates. Instead of magically flying around roadblocks, as it does with APAS, it simply stops and hovers in place at 4K60 and 5.4K.
The app also runs the drone’s more advanced flight features. You’ll tap through its menus to access Quick Shots for automated orbits, reveals, and other common drone imagery. DJI has included these for several product cycles, and is adding a more robust version with the Air 2S.
They’re called Master Shots and combine automated flight paths with camera movements. You need to pick a subject—for a quick test I chose myself—and the drone does the rest of the work. For my selfie video, it included a few different pull back and reveal shots, corkscrew orbits, and a final zoom in that stopped the drone just a few feet from my person. Everything is automatic, and the camera moves are definitely pro-grade, but the output is limited to 1080p30 quality.
DJI Fly also includes some basic video editing tools, but it’s limited to 1080p output—fine for a quick social post, but not the reason you bought a drone with a 5.4K video camera. It also includes a useful Flight Log function, so you can go back and review your flights to check speed, altitude, and the like. In the event that you have to land the drone somewhere you aren’t, the Find My Drone function will pinpoint the last known location on a map.
There are a few improvements we’d like to see DJI make to its app. We’re happy that it includes multiple color spaces for video, but we’d like to see some more, including black-and-white and vivid modes, for pilots who may not want to spend as much time toning videos and color correcting footage. For pros, a built-in monitoring LUT for D-Log recording would be a worthwhile addition, as the low-contrast D-Log footage isn’t as easy to view on a phone screen under bright sunlight.
A Bigger Sensor for Better Photos
The Air 2S has a few design tweaks compared with the Mavic Air 2, including angled forward obstacle sensors for better mapping during flight, but it’s the camera that marks the real difference between the two.
For the Air 2S, DJI went with a 1-inch sensor design. The sensor size is about four times as large, in terms of surface area, as the Mavic Air 2’s camera. Not only is it physically larger, the 2S camera sports bigger pixels, 20MP in total.
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That’s in contrast to the Mavic Air 2, which uses a 48MP Quad Bayer sensor, similar to the main camera in the OnePlus 9 Pro. The Air 2 is capable of making photos with more pixels—though most will use its 12MP binned output—but there’s more to a picture than pixels.
The Air 2S’s 1-inch sensor works at 20MP all the time, with support for JPG or Raw DNG imaging. Raw files offer more room to edit—the files promise up to 12.6 stops of dynamic range. They also manage to show a bit more detail, and less noise, than the 48MP images from the Air 2.
There’s little bad to be said about photo quality. Images are sharp, the standard JPG color profile is pleasing, and you can tone or filter Raw shots to your heart’s content. I noted a little purple color fringing, and slight softness, at the corners of the frame, but not that you’d notice without pixel peeping. There’s also a bit of barrel distortion visible in Raw format, but it’s minor to the point that I only noticed it when viewing JPGs side by side.
It puts the camera closer to the one DJI includes on its Mavic 2 Pro, but the two aren’t identical. The Mavic 2 Pro includes Hasselblad color science, as well as a mechanical aperture. The latter is important for landscapes, as it lets you get images with multi-point sunstars, and for video it cuts incoming light to get the slower shutter speeds cinematographers desire.
The JPG output matches DJI’s default color profile for video and nets natural-looking aerial landscape shots. Raw images hold up quite well to post-processing, too. In scenes with dramatic skies it’s easy to darken them a bit to make clouds pop, while opening up shadows to better show subjects on the ground. If you’re a fan of filters, the Raw files hold up to edits better than JPGs—I used the RNI All Films film look pack for Lightroom to tone images to my taste.
5.4K Video
The Air 2S camera also records at a higher maximum resolution than the Air 2, 5.4K instead of 4K. It’s not a small difference in pixel count either—each frame from a 5.4K clip contains about 16.8MP, just about twice that of an 8MB 4K frame.
The extra resolution is palpable when watching video on big TVs, but doesn’t really translate to phone or tablet displays. 5.4K is available at the 24, 25, or 30fps frame rates, and works for standard, HDR HLG, and D-Log profiles.
Dropping down to 4K ups the maximum frame rate to 60fps, the same maximum at 2.7K and 1080p for standard recording. There’s a separate slow-motion option, accessible via the app, for recording at 1080p120 only. For the most part the drone operates exactly the same at these lower resolutions, but you will gain subject tracking and automatic navigation around obstacles at 30fps and lower in all modes except for 5.4K.
The Air 2S supports 8-bit H.264 capture and higher-quality 10-bit HEVC. I used the latter for testing. You’re unlikely to notice the difference when using the standard color profile, but the extra data contained in a 10-bit file comes in handy for cinematographers who take the time to work in the flat D-Log format and apply color correction to footage. The HDR HLG format is also 10-bit.
The upgraded video is a two-edged sword, though. To get the most out of it, you’ll need to invest in higher-end video editing software. I worked with Air 2S footage in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2021 and Apple Final Cut X. Basic apps, including the editor that puts in the DJI Fly app, can edit the video, but not with full-quality output.
Things aren’t always perfect with pro software, though. I ran into some issues exporting footage from Premiere Pro—only the first frame of each clip would show in a finished edit. DJI is aware of the issue and recommended I transcode footage before editing, or use Adobe Media Encoder to render out footage. We expect the issue to sort itself out in time. Adobe often lags adding Raw support for still cameras, but always gets there.
Final Cut Pro was a better overall experience. It had no problems with any of the video formats, it was definitely easier to configure to handle HDR HLG footage than Adobe, and it was just as easy to apply a LUT to D-Log footage as it is with Premiere Pro. Be prepared to invest in pro editing software if you want to get the most out of the Air 2S camera.
In addition to standard still imaging and video, the Air 2S supports time-lapse with motion, also called hyperlapse. You’ll have the option of flying the drone manually, or setting different positions and camera angles.
Time-lapse takes time, of course. The clip above was made from around 360 images, shot over about 12 minutes, close to half the dron’es battery life. Time-lapse fans should definitely go for the Fly More kit, assuming you want to take more than one when you’re out and about.
The final product is just 15 seconds, but shows how steady the drone is, even when panning, thanks to a combination of automated movements, the physical stabilization provided by the camera gimbal, and some additional electronic image stabilization.
A Good Drone for Photo and Video Pros
The Air 2S debuts less than a year after the Mavic Air 2 and is meant to coexist with its predecessor in the market, not replace it. For $200 more than the Mavic Air 2, you get just a few improvements with the drone itself—the big change is an extra set of obstacle sensors, positioned forward and facing slightly up.
It’s the camera that marks the real difference. The Air 2S nets still images with better detail and more dynamic range, and its video has greater bit depth and twice as many pixels as a 4K drone can capture. If you have the know-how to work with Raw photos, D-Log, and HDR HLG video, you’ll enjoy more malleable, editable files than you will with the Mavic Air 2.
If you have a critical eye, or are a video editing maven, the extra $200 you’ll spend on the Air 2S is worth it. Otherwise we’re continuing to recommend the Mavic Air 2 as our Editors’ Choice for most drone buyers—its feature set is nearly as extensive, and its camera is better than good enough for most applications.
