Nikon D850 vs DJI Mavic Air 2 - how this new drone camera sensor stacks up to a professional DSLR

#d850 #mavicair2
In this video I compare the Mavic Air II to a DSLR camera, my Nikon D850.
I compare low light, daylight, portraits and large prints from each camera to see if my friends can tell which camera took which photo.

I am here to look a little closer at the Mavic Air II’s camera and how the new and bigger sensor compares to a full frame DSLR, the Nikon D850. My name is Nicholas Johnson and this is the space warehouse.
Ok so Im not comparing these two devices just as tools you might consider to use interchangeably - clearly I cant make my DSLR fly any more than I can attach a 70-200 to the front of this fella… and OBVIOUSLY the Nikon D850, a professional grade camera with a full frame 45 megapixel sensor and wide swatch of available lenses will take an objectively better photo - but maybe not by as much as you might think!

I found some old footage from my very first drone flight ever, I got it for Christmas from my mom I’ll bet she bought it at the mall kiosk or some thing, hi mom, but it shoots in unstabilized 480 P it’s completely and totally worthless… But the intrigue, the intrigue!

With this years Mavic Air 2 update, they’ve not only updated the resolution to 48mp - they’ve also updated the camera sensor to make it actually bigger, calling it a 1/2” sensor (although, strangely, everywhere I can find on the internet that shows the actual size of that sensor lists it as 6.4 x 4.8 mm, Im not sure where the “1/2”” sensor quote comes from, since even taken diagonally, its apparently only 0.3” but whatever, either way its less than half the size of the DSLR one.

I wanted to see just how much the sensor size difference matters - so I headed over to the UCF campus and then the warehouse, to find out!
Daylight subject far away

The first comparison I set up was a shot in daylight, with the cameras positioned in the same spot as each other - and far from their subject.. Pretty much perfect conditions for the sensor size NOT to matter, since mainly what you get from a physically larger sensor is both low light performance and less noise - not to mention the ability to produce bokeh - and none of that applies for these first few shots.
OK, when we take these into light room.. (continue with that discussion)
Good Light with a very close up subject
The Mavic Air II is not meant for closeups. You will not be taking any portraits with this camera. It has a fixed focal distance, starting at 1 meter, and even at that spot, things behind my subject were in better focus.
To be fair, though, this is a limitation of the lens, not the camera, but they didn’t build in an autofocus, its just focussed similar to a go pro, on everything. So there is no method to get background separation. The depth of field is infinity.
Looking at the Nikon D850 - well.. this is literally one of the things this sort of camera was specifically designed to do, so… Thats closeups. No surprise there.

I found a pretty good spot between two buildings to exercise the HDR feature on this drone. When shooting RAW (and why would you ever shoot ay other way?) it shoots with AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing). Basically it will take three or 5 shots at different exposure settings automatically; just like the D850, and then its up to you to combine them afterwards. I use lightroom. Its really easy, you just select each of the 5 photos, right click and choose HDR from the Photo Merge drop down menu; that merges the photos together and then you can tweet the edit from there.

Ok, so for a low light test, I kept with the theme of perfect and equal conditions - so Im not comparing shots from the drone while its flying, a: because I cant make my DSLR fly in order to get a similar shot, but b: theres of course going to be vibration and shakes when the drone is hovering, and for really dark scenes I need the shutter open for like half a second and Im mostly curious to compare these sensors in as perfect of conditions as I can give them. When you zoom in and look around, the thing that stands out to me is the noise. This wall is pretty noisy, Joes face is pretty noisy.
So for low light, as far as wide city shots where youre looking at the whole thing at once - and especially comparing those shots to older drones, this thing great for taking shots, even at night.
Compared to a low light juggernaut like the Nikon D850, though… Its Jake Paul in a 1980’s Tyson fight..

BUT - as part of my daytime shots test, I decided to print out a couple of the photographs I made at UCF really big. I made these 2 foot by 3 foot prints, hung them on the wall in the Space Warehouse Gallery and then invited my friends over to take a look at them.

0:00 intro
0:21 purpose of tests
1:15 Sensor Size
1:51 Daylight Photo comparison
5:00 HDR
6:50 Portraits (subject separation)
7:38 Low Light Tests
9:42 Seeing if people can tell

Видео Nikon D850 vs DJI Mavic Air 2 - how this new drone camera sensor stacks up to a professional DSLR канала SPACE DESIGN WAREHOUSE