 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Tom from Morton's On The Move and today we are taking a look at the DJI Mavic Pro drone. Stick around! Drones are a great way for travelers to capture themselves and their environments around them, their beautiful scenery, and whatever's going on. But the problem is a lot of times they are bulky or delicate and difficult to lug around. But the DJI Mavic Pro solves a lot of those problems. What makes this drone so unique is that it folds up into a relatively small package. All the propellers fold up like so and the arms actually fold in as well. It folds up into a relatively small package that you could almost put in your pocket. This thing's about 3.2 inches wide and 3.2 inches tall and about 7.8 inches long all folded up. That portable size makes it so much easier to take with you on your adventures to be able to capture the shots that you want. Most consumer drones are flying cameras and this one has the camera up front. Under this silicone cover there's this clear plastic bulb that protects the camera from getting bumped. You can fly with this piece of plastic on but you get a lot of lens flare, so a lot of people take it off. But especially when learning it's not a bad thing to leave on in case you accidentally did crash. It might protect the camera and gimbal. Removing the plastic cover is easy. It just clips off the bottom and this camera is gimbled, which means it can pivot and rotate to keep the camera steady no matter how the drone is pitching and moving when in the air. There's a little plastic piece that sits behind the gimbal that needs to be removed before every flight and inserted when you're done because it locks the gimbal up and protects the very delicate components that allow that camera to move around. Popping that out, you'll notice that this camera basically it kind of can jiggle around and it can point in a number of different directions. The camera can point straight down all the way up to about 30 degrees above the horizon. The camera on this drone has a 12.35 megapixel sensor on it and it can take pretty high resolution pictures and shoot video up to 4k. The sensor is relatively small. It's a 1 over 2.3 inch sensor, so it's not great at really low light. But if it's a bright day and you're out in the middle of the day, it captures some pretty stunning sharp quality pictures. The drone itself is mostly plastic, but it's relatively well built. It's nice and sturdy feeling. The bottom of it here is metal and these fins here are cooling fins because this thing is basically a flying computer. There's a lot of computation going on and it needs to cool itself because it's doing a lot of thinking and it's also running a lot of electronic speed controllers and things like that to run and control the motors extremely precisely. On the bottom of the drone, you'll notice that it has these two little indents here. These right here are actually cameras that look down all the time and help stabilize the drone by comparing the ground to how the drone's moving and helps it stay stationary in the air. You'll also see these two round circles right here. These are sonar detectors and they look at the ground as well and they help it measure altitude, so it knows if it's going up or down and it can very, very accurately hover at low altitudes using those systems. On the front here, it has two more cameras, one here and one here. And it uses stereoscopic vision similar to how our own eyes work to figure out if something is in front of it. The onboard computation uses those cameras to provide obstacle avoidance. Unless it's turned off from your controller, this drone will actually prevent from crashing into something when flying forward. If landing protection is on, it will also use the cameras on the bottom from crashing into something when it's going down. Now, it doesn't have any obstacle avoidance on the side or back, so that's something you have to note when flying this around. If you're going sideways, you could fly right into the side of a building and it's not going to do anything to help you prevent that. Now, this little drone sits extremely low to the ground. It sits up on the legs on the front and on the back here, it just has this one little leg that it sits on here. And that makes it kind of difficult to take off from grass or anything like that because it's so low and these propellers are so close to the ground. It's not recommended by DJI, but you can take off from your hand or someone else's hand. You can actually hold it out and take off from their hand and I frequently land that way as well because it's just not really designed to land on anything but a hard surface. What's pretty incredible about this drone is for its size, it has an incredibly long range. In the US, you could see upwards of four miles range, controllability and live video stream from this drone back to your controller. If you're flying elsewhere in the world, this drone will automatically derate itself for the European standards, but you're still going to see over two miles of range out of this drone. Being able to fly that far away, you would need decent flight time and speed to actually make use of that. And this drone will get about 20 to 25 minutes of flight time and can fly at speeds up to 40 miles an hour. That 40 miles an hour, however, is only if the obstacle avoidance is disabled and you put it into sport mode. Sport mode enables the drone to pitch a lot further forward and fly extremely fast, but the obstacle avoidance up here only works at about up to 20 miles an hour. To achieve those speeds and flight time, the drone is relatively light, it only weighs about 1.6 pounds, about half pound of that is the battery itself. The battery sits atop the back of the drone here, it's kind of piggyback and it has these two release buttons that you squeeze to pop the battery off. The battery is an 11.4 volt lithium ion polymer battery that has about 43 watt hours of power in it. The battery is fully rechargeable and you will get a DJI charger that is designated to charge this battery when you purchase the drone. The batteries are extremely smart as well, there is actually a computer inside each one of these batteries that monitors all of the cells, makes sure they're within characteristics and will prevent it from doing something dangerous that could possibly catch fire or damage itself. If you push the button on the top here, that's actually how you turn on the battery and that's actually how the drone is turned on too. You don't really turn the drone on, you turn the battery on and start providing power to the drone. If you push that button you'll see lights on here that are giving you a general indication of how much power is in the battery. When hooked up to your controller you can see all the characteristics of the battery including how many times it's been discharged, how many times it's been charged and the batteries will also automatically discharge themselves from 100% full down to about 80, 70, 80% to protect themselves as lithium ion polymer batteries are not good to be left fully charged all the time. Because all of this is built right into the batteries of the DJI Mavic it makes it really nice, you don't have to think about it and they should last a very long time. In addition to the cameras and the sonar that this drone has it also uses GPS and GLONASS the Russian GPS system to help find where it is in the world and stabilize itself. That means if the wind is blowing it would normally just blow this thing away if it didn't have some sort of stabilization but it's going to use that GPS to help lock itself in position in the sky. That makes it a lot easier for you to fly it and control it because you basically don't have to think about the wind anymore. This little drone amazingly can fly in winds 20 to 25 miles per hour without any problems. So now let's take a look at the controller. This is the controller that comes with the drone and as you can see it's relatively small and compact as well. Just like the drone this thing folds out as well. The antennas themselves are right here on the top and they click together and fold out and they need to be folded out before flight. On the controller itself it has a screen here that will display a whole bunch of information about your flight characteristics and such. And how this is designed to work is that it's designed to put your own device into this cradle that folds out on the bottom of the controller here. You do need an Android or Apple device to fly this drone and be able to see what it's seeing. You can set your phone or device into the cradle here and collapse these around it and fly the drone just like so looking at what the drone sees on the screen right here. The controller plugs into your Android or Apple device via a cable that plugs into the side here and runs down and actually plugs into the phone right here. You have to connect your phone like so to the plug and then slide it into the controller. You also need to get the DJI Go 4 app to fly the Mavic and you're going to have to create a login with DJI to be able to use it. Personally I like to fly on a much larger screen so we use an iPad and I use an adapter that actually slides into the position where the phone would slide into and raises the iPad up. The only drawback to that is that I cannot see the screen easily on the controller but on the DJI Go 4 app you still get all the information that's displayed on the Mavic screen here. The controller is designed to connect to another device via a USB port and is a full size USB port on the bottom of the controller here and we use this little coiled USB connection to plug the iPad directly into the USB port on the bottom. It connects to the DJI Go app just like if you are using a phone or a smaller device and it really works well. The controller is rechargeable just like the batteries for the drone itself. The charger that's designed to charge the batteries also has USB ports on it and is designed to be able to charge the controller which you actually plug in the charger through the same port that your phone plugs into. The battery life on the controller isn't bad. It's definitely not as good as some drones I've flown in the past but it has a relatively powerful transmitter in it. There's actually a little bit of fan in the controller itself and when you're flying at long ranges for a long period of time it gets kind of warm and that fan will kick on. Because it's using so much power I'd say that I normally see maybe 5-8 flights before I need to recharge the controller itself. So this drone can be flown with just the controller even without a phone. You can turn it on and it'll connect and you can use this information here to fly the drone around. You have controls on the controller itself to take pictures, take video, you have little wheels up here that this wheel pulling it down will point the gimbal on the camera itself down and pushing it up will push the gimbal up. Over here you have controls to scroll back and forth and adjust the ISO and sensitivity of the camera. On the right hand side of the controller here you'll see a little button that says sport and this button can be flicked down or up easily on the whim. And what that's going to do is when it's flicked up into sport mode it's going to disable all the obstacle avoidance on the drone and make it be able to fly a lot faster. In normal mode the drone will fly 15 to 20 miles per hour and is kind of sluggish. You can change all of the parameters of how it flies in the settings of the app. But in sport mode it's a lot faster, a lot more responsive and you can really get somewhere quick because it'll push the speed to about 40 miles per hour maximum. On the bottom of the controller you also have two buttons here, the kind of hot buttons that can also be programmed to do different things. And a lot of times the app will pop up with a question like are you sure you want to enter or exit this mode? You can select yes or no just by pressing these buttons here so you don't really have to take your hands off the controller very often at all. So you can fly the drone with just the controller, with the controller and a phone or an iPad or you can actually fly the drone with just your phone as well. On the side of the drone there is a slot for an SD card here and it can take I believe up to 128 gigabyte SD card. We typically run a 64 gigabyte SD card in the drone and that's where the primary video is stored. You can also set your device that you're flying on up to record the video that the drone sees and transmits back to you but the video here is going to be a much higher resolution. The drone transmits back 720p high definition video so you can really get a great idea of what it's seeing. But still you can't record 1080p or 4k video off of this device. It needs to be stored on an SD card on the drone itself. Inside this little slot here there is a switch that says Wi-Fi or RC and if it's switched to Wi-Fi mode you can actually fly this drone using your phone alone without the controller at all. It uses the Wi-Fi functionality of your phone and you're going to be able to control it with little joysticks that will show up on the screen. However it's going to be very limited in range and functionality because you just can't go very far a couple hundred feet. But if you didn't want to take the controller with you go for a hike with just the drone you could still get it up to take that selfie without using the controller at all. So all this may sound pretty complicated and there is a lot to it but the learning curve is actually not as steep as you may think. Because the drone has such incredible stability in it and there's a number of beginner modes that you can turn on in the app, learning to fly is actually quite easy. You can take off and just let off the controllers, let off the sticks and the drone is just going to hover right there. And all you have to do is just learn how to fly it forward, back and everything very slowly until you really get the hang of it. You can learn to fly it at your own pace and slowly integrate all of these advanced features that come with the drone. There's so many additional features that are really great for cinematographers as well like Autonomous Flight functionality where you can tell the drone to circle an object or you can have it track an object and have it follow it automatically. You can tell the drone to fly a path or follow the terrain automatically so that you don't accidentally crash into a rock. There are so many things that you can do with this drone more than I can cover in the video today. But if you look into it I think that the capabilities of this drone are some of the most advanced on the market for the price and the compactness that you get in this unit. I think that this drone is a really great traveler's drone because of its size and compactness. I think it's relatively sturdy, it's extremely well built. I mean the machining and everything is really top notch. But the camera is a bit delicate because it has this full three-axis gimbal. A lot could go wrong here. It needs to be braced when not in use, hence the little plastic piece that goes in here. I'd say that's definitely a drawback to this drone as this can be kind of difficult to get in here and you have to be so careful with this camera that you could easily damage something here. If care is taken with this though, I think that overall it's a really sturdy drone. We primarily carry it in this case right here. Everything fits into this little satchel that we can throw over our shoulder. It's almost always in the truck with us and ready to go whenever an opportunity might arise that we need to fly. If you're looking to travel with a bit sturdier of an option though, something like this might be a great option. This is a hard case designed to carry all the components of the Mavic and as you can see, it carries three batteries, the controller, the Mavic and a number of different accessories and will keep it waterproof and really, really ruggedized. Even this is a relatively small package to carry such a powerful drone. I've had this drone for about a year now and for the most part it's been very reliable. It's got about 20 flight hours on it now meaning it's been in the air for about 20 hours and I haven't had anything that's really concerned me like it was going to crash or I was going to lose it but we have had a few weird issues. The gimbal restarted a handful of times but that seemed to be fixed with some firmware updates that DJI has pushed to the drone over the year. And those firmware updates can be a bit of a pain. A lot of times you'll fire up your DJI Go app and it says firmware needs to be updated. That just entails connecting your device to a Wi-Fi network and allowing it to update the drone which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour. The other problem that we've had with our particular unit is that the gimbal for some reason will always max itself out when we turn it on. When it's testing itself it slams to all its limits and I tried to contact DJI to inquire about this and they really weren't very helpful to get this straightened out. DJI is a Chinese company but they do have pretty good support in the US and Europe for their products. They told me that this was probably normal performance but I could send it in and they'd look at it but I didn't really want to do that and it continues to do that every time we start it up but it hasn't seemed to cause any problems with the drone so far. Another thing I like about the Mavic is there's a lot of accessories you can get for it. It's a relatively popular model. For everyone here we have the Polar Pro filter, ND filters or polarizing filters to change the image quality a bit. We clearly fly with the iPad a lot and there's a lot of different mounts for holding iPads. As we talked earlier there's the mounts for raising it up. There's a lot of different accessories you can get so that you can really customize this drone to what you're trying to do with it. Batteries are relatively cost effective for this drone as well so you can get a handful of them and you can just continuously swap them out. DJI also makes a 4 battery charging unit that you can just connect all these batteries to and plug it in and it will charge all the batteries one after another so that you don't have to continuously plug in and charge each battery one at a time. There are a handful of other drones that compete with the Mavic but the range of this drone, even if you're not going to use the range it has such solid transmission quality that even at a shorter distance it's just rock solid video and control of the drone itself. The functions and features, those additional autonomous functionality, the obstacle avoidance, all of this comes together in such a nice package that I think really gives it a lot of bang for the buck. DJI is also a real leader in the consumer drone market. They've been through a number of their different drones, the Phantom series all the way up to their Inspire series and they've really taken a lot of the learnings from those drones and packed them into this drone to provide a really nice package and give you a lot of features. For the investment, the functionality, the foldability of it, I think this is a very quality product that will hold up really well. Now that this drone is about a year old, DJI did come out with another product, the DJI Spark which may be even a little better for travelers. It's a little bit smaller, probably a little bit more robust but lacks a few of the features like the range and the quality of the video. While this is our go-to drone and we use a lot of video from this, there are some drones out there that will provide better video quality. The sensor in this is really small so you're going to see it wash out a little bit more. You're not getting a really big depth of range in the contrast and it's also going to grain up a lot more as the light goes down. If you're flying after sunset, you're going to see a lot more grain in the footage compared to something with a larger sensor. If you're looking for a drone, especially something to travel with, the Mavic offers so many features and takes such great video that I highly recommend it for anyone looking to travel with a drone. It provides a lot of features, the compactness, the robustness, and the quality all come together to make this a really great middle of the road package. I will provide some links in the description below this video for this drone itself and some competitors and some more information that might help you out in making a decision if this drone is right for you. As always, thank you so much for watching Road Gear Reviews. I'm Tom from Mortons on the Move and we will see you next time.