The Air 3S is DJI's new mid-range drone that builds on the Air 3 in a few notable ways. These include better image quality, especially in low light conditions, and avoiding obstacles at night to ensure the drone returns home safely. That's promising, since the versatile (if boring) Air 3 already had excellent low-light performance when we tested it last year.
“The DJI Air 3S takes our Air series to a new level by offering professional features such as dual primary cameras and omnidirectional obstacle detection while maintaining its lightweight weight of just 724g for limitless freedom and flexibility,” said Ferdinand Wolf, Product Experience Director at DJI, in a press release. “The Air 3S is the perfect all-rounder for travel photography – capturing all your special moments on vacation while providing security for night photography.”
DJI has equipped the Air 3S with a wide range of sensors to enable obstacle detection at night, including forward-facing LiDAR, downward-facing infrared time-of-flight sensors and a total of six vision sensors; Two each at the front, back and bottom.
The Air 3S features an improved 50-megapixel 1-inch sensor and a 24mm lens on the main camera, as well as a 48-megapixel 1/1.3-inch sensor with a 70mm lens (3 -x zoom), each of which offers a dynamic range of up to 14 stops when shooting in automatic mode (not in slow motion or in portrait format). 10-bit videos can also be encoded in H.265 with improved ISO.
The main camera can record 4K/60fps HDR and 4K/120fps videos. And according to DJI, the resulting file sizes are over 30 percent smaller compared to the Air 3. The Air 3S has 42GB of built-in storage in addition to microSD expansion to ensure you can capture all footage collected over 45 minutes for maximum flight time. Files can then be transferred wirelessly to your phone without even having to turn on the drone, or to your laptop via a USB-C cable.
Of course, the latest DJI drone has plenty of smart shooting options, including ActiveTrack 360 for automatically tracking subjects. The Air 3S ensures that the subject remains in focus during manual flight or when it moves to the edge of the frame – allowing the pilot to concentrate more on image composition and camera movement. Both cameras also support DJI's free Panorama mode, which can stitch multiple images together with a manually selected subject or area.
DJI's Air 3S is available today in various kits on store.dji.com. Prices start at $1,099 / £959 / €1,099 for the combo, which includes a DJI RC-N3 controller to control things from your phone.