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 3S is the best drone for budding aerial photographers and videographers because it provides automated obstacle avoidance and two high-quality cameras, while also offering overall ease of use. Although our upgrade pick, the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, gives you even better camera quality and battery life, the Air 3S is impressive enough to please most people—for half the price.
It avoids obstacles with ease. The Air 3S can detect obstacles as they approach—from any direction—and then make flight-path adjustments to avoid them. It is also the first consumer-level DJI drone to incorporate lidar, which can detect objects that aren’t visible to the camera-based sensors—in this case added to the front of the drone.
When we deliberately tried to fly the Air 3S straight at a tree or slam it into the ground during the day, the drone emitted a loud beep and stopped itself or simply continued around the obstacle. And when we launched the drone at night and flew it directly at a fence hidden in deep shadow, it beeped at us again and stopped well before making contact, showing that the lidar sensor works as expected.
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 3S’s main camera has a 24mm-equivalent, f/1.8 lens with a large, 1-inch sensor—the same size found in our top point-and-shoot camera pick—and a wide, f/1.8 aperture, meaning it’s capable of producing clearer images in difficult low-light situations than competing drones. The footage we were able to capture during testing was as crisp and as high-quality as we expected.
The 70mm-equivalent telephoto camera is mounted just above the main camera and has a smaller, 1/1.3-inch sensor with a 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 a different look from the type that drone videographers have grown used to with models in this price range.
In our tests, the Air 3S’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 3S was unfailingly stable. It didn’t drift, and it consistently recorded steady video, even when it rose above the tree line.
Other, comparably sized DJI drones we tested performed similarly, but the newer Flip and every Mini-series drone were more affected by wind. Like many drones, the Air 3S 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 45 minutes—a claim borne out in the course of our testing—the Air 3S can capture plenty of footage and still have enough battery life left to travel back home. And even though its 42 GB of internal storage is a welcome upgrade over the Air 3’s 8 GB, you’ll still 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 3S 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 3S measures 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches when folded—about the size of a large coffee thermos—and weighs 1.6 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 3S 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
- DJI products come with security considerations. 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.
- Its camera sensor isn’t the largest in DJI’s range. The Air 3S has a smaller camera sensor than the Mavic 3 Pro. 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, so that camera might be a better choice for professional video production.
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