DJI’s Air 3S drone is a low light all-rounder

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New features include improved low-light image quality that was already great and nighttime obstacle avoidance to bring it safely home.

By Thomas Ricker, a deputy editor and Verge co-founder with a passion for human-centric cities, e-bikes, and life as a digital nomad. He’s been a tech journalist for almost 20 years.

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The DJI Air 3S.

The DJI Air 3S.
Image: DJI

The Air 3S is DJI’s new mid-range drone that builds upon the Air 3 in a few notable ways. These include better image quality, especially in low light, with nighttime obstacle avoidance to help ensure the drone returns home safely. That’s promising since the versatile (if boring) Air 3 already had great low-light performance when we reviewed it last year.

“The DJI Air 3S takes our Air Series to new heights by offering professional features like dual primary cameras and omnidirectional obstacle sensing while retaining its light weight of just 724g for boundless freedom and flexibility,” said DJI Product Experience Director Ferdinand Wolf in a press release. “The Air 3S is the perfect all-rounder for travel photography — capturing all your special moments during vacation while also providing safety and security if operating at night.”

The Air 3S has a smart return-to-home (R2H) features that works at night.

The Air 3S has a smart return-to-home (R2H) features that works at night.
The Air 3S has a smart return-to-home (R2H) features that works at night.
Image: DJI

DJI fitted the Air 3S with broad suite of sensors to enable nightscape obstacle sensing, including front-facing LiDAR, downward infrared time-of-flight sensors, and a total of six vision sensors; two each on the front, rear, and bottom. 

The Air 3S features an improved 50 megapixel, 1-inch sensor and 24mm lens on the primary camera, alongside a 48 megapixel, 1/1.3-inch sensor with a 70mm (3x zoom) lens, each offering up to 14 stops of dynamic range when shooting in auto (not slow-motion or vertical). 10-bit video can be encoded in H.265 with improved ISO as well.

The primary camera can shoot 4K/60fps HDR and 4K/120fps video. And according to DJI, the resulting file sizes are over 30 percent smaller compared to the Air 3. The Air 3S comes with 42GB of built-in storage in addition to microSD expansion to be sure you can capture all the footage collected over a 45 minute maximum flight time. Files can then be transferred wirelessly to your phone without even turning the drone on, or via a USB-C cable to your laptop.

Naturally, the newest DJI drone comes with plenty of intelligent shooting options including ActiveTrack 360 to automatically track subjects. The Air 3S keeps the subject focused during manual flight or when it moves to the edge of the frame — that way the pilot can worry more about the composition and camera movement. Both cameras also support DJI’s Free panorama mode that can stitch together multiple images with a manually selected subject or area.

DJI’s Air 3S is available starting today on store.dji.com in a variety of kits. Prices start at $1099 / £959 / €1099 for the combo that includes a DJI RC-N3 controller to pilot things from your phone.

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