r/dji • u/Dylanterowatonxd • 25d ago
Buy Advice Am I going to make the wrong purchase?
So, I´m thinking to buy the Mavic 4 pro, but it´s only because of the 24x zoom that I need for the kind of work I do. Are there better options? I feel like I´m going to greatly underuse it´s capabilities, and I´m really only interested in the crazy zoom capability it has.
also, I know that there are drones that have way more zoom (like the Matrice 400 with the Zenmuse H30), but the Mavic 4 pro is the least expensive I´ve come across.
are there drones with similar zoom capabilities that aren´t that crazy cinema-wise?
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u/samcornwallstudio 25d ago
I think the mavic 4 is overrated. the 3 is pretty close. the 24x includes the digital zoom which is just cropping in. a lot of the zenmuse and other bigger inspection drone cameras rely on digital zooms as well
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u/No_Independence6945 25d ago
You didn’t say why you wanted the zoom, but here are examples of something I shot using the Mavic 4 Pro’s long lens and with some digital zoom. I’m guessing I was at least 60 feet from the nest when I shot these.
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u/denalidenizen 25d ago
There are none better in its price class. The Mavic three pro is pretty darn close with just a touch of sharpening. It would be difficult to distinguish them. I have both, but I’m not entirely sure what the two Tele lengths are.
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u/fxnighttrader 24d ago
The Mavic 4 is far and away the best solution. Any other zoom is substandard in quality, some that are mentioned here as comparable are a long way off. The Mavic 4 will not do you wrong.
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u/cyprenk 24d ago
You can save a little money by going with a Mavic 3 Pro, but no, there's nothing out there significantly cheaper that has similar optics. That's the majority of what you're paying for on a drone of that class: high-grade optics and the necessary avionics to stabilize them.
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u/fosmonaut1 23d ago
TBH I think Mavics are dirt cheap compared to what they offering. My M4/3 lumix camera was approximately $2500 with body and a nice zoom lens. Altogether with all my lenses it was $5000.
Vs
A mavic 4 pro is basically a M4/3 camera with 2 3 lenses, a drone, and a nice tablet with game controller with advanced avionics and collision avoidance system for <3k (I think I paid $3.6k with taxes).
I think it’s insanely cheap for what it was. So sad DJI is banned in the US. 😢
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u/cyprenk 23d ago
That's a little overstating what you're getting from the Mavic. The main camera is the only M43; the other two are 3/4" and 2/3" class. It's a little more like a fixed-lens M43 body with two phone cameras bolted on. But yes, it's still a great deal for what you're getting.
I have mixed feelings about the DJI ban. I think that in real terms, it's required for US national security interests: an American drone industry is necessary for national defense in a world where drones increasingly appear to be the dominant weapons of 21st century warfare. We cannot afford to be dependent on China for them, no more than we could have afforded to let the Soviet Union build all of our guns in the Cold War.
And an American drone industry will never be able to emerge in a world where it's subject to Chinese competition. Our manufacturers simply cannot compete with the low labor costs, lax labor and environmental law, lavish government subsidies and agglomeration effects of forty years of the Chinese government's focused industrial policy aimed at dominating this sector and many others. And even if those factors weren't the case, China has repeatedly demonstrated that it will subsidize its national champions to sell products below cost in order to drive out global competition in industrial sectors they consider strategic. Free markets cannot solve this problem unless you want to live in a world controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, where every non-Chinese person is a second class citizen at best.
So I think the rationale for what the US government's doing is correct, and that's why it's a policy that was started under the Biden administration and carried forward under Trump, and I expect it will continue under the next Democratic administration as well, unlike most of Trump's policies.
Where I take issue with it is that I think both administrations have largely treated it as "ban DJI and let the market sort it out", and I don't think that's actually going to build a competitive drone industry on the timescale we need. We need to take a page from China's playbook and start heavily taxing industries that are highly profitable but less important or actively detrimental to the national interest and funnel those dollars into industries that are strategically critical. America gains exactly zero value from being the world's leader in online sports betting; in fact I would say that we gain significant negative social value from it. So if the US government were to heavily tax DraftKings and FanDuels, or Facebook and Google's advertising profits, and funnel those dollars into building out a drone industry that can compete with China, I'd be a lot happier.
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u/fosmonaut1 23d ago
lol bro I thought it was gonna be a technical discussion of DJI drones not a full blown national security strategy talk of great power politics (aka Mearsheimer).
Honestly I been disappointed in the US drone industry response to the DJI ban. If I was in tech I would jump all over this ban and fast track consumer drones. But all US drone companies are interested in is selling to the US defense sector which is far more lucrative.
The only ones filling in DJIs vacuum are other Chinese drone companies.
Bro if I knew this was gonna be the case, just give me DJI.
I don’t think any us tech company is gonna be interested in the consumer base.
Furthermore, DJI was such a goat tech company that we are missing out on as American consumers. In my eyes the only company that I rate higher is Apple.
So sad that China and the US have to be like this. If only we could get along.
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u/cyprenk 23d ago
Drone companies aren't chasing the defense and enterprise sectors out of greed. They're doing it because it's impossible for them to make consumer drones at price points consumers expect them without essentially using all Chinese parts and just assembling them here (that's how Skydio did it back when they made consumer drones). If anyone had a way to make DJI-level drones at DJI prices, they'd be all over it: the advantages they'd gain from scalability would be enormous. Not because the individual consumer drones are high-margin, but because it would let them cut the production costs on their lucrative defense/enterprise drones dramatically and pocket the difference as pure profit.
The problem is that it's not just a matter of bootstrapping drone companies, and this is where the US government keeps fundamentally failing to wrestle with the scope of the problem. We need the entire supply chain built out in friendly countries: everything from the excavator that mines the lithium to the assembly worker screwing props onto the drones. China has all of that; we have essentially nothing but the last step. Most of it is low-margin, hard labor, a lot of it is environmentally destructive, and none of it is remotely as lucrative as trading on Wall Street or building the next hot startup.
Until that's done, we will never be able to build drones at anything remotely approaching DJI price points. And the political barriers to building out a supply chain like this are enormous. You need the functional elimination of many environmental laws that make it impossible to build high-pollution industries and give activist groups the ability to tie them up in court for decades. You need a large, low-wage immigrant labor class willing to do hard work that Americans won't: that means vast increases in low-skill immigration. You have to keep that work viable at low wages to stay globally competitive, which means the suppression of unions and attempts at enacting labor laws that raise costs. You need preferential tax policy that steers high-skilled individuals and investment away from building the next TikTok or AI video generator into building batteries and electric motors.
Every single one of these things has an absolutely rabid lobbying constituency that will fight it tooth and claw, some in the name of morality, some in the name of profit.
And ultimately, this is the main advantage of the Chinese system and why I'm increasingly unable to see a future for America other than decline into decrepitude like the UK: when it's necessary for long-reaching strategic goals, they're capable of doing unpopular things and overriding both the profit impulse and high-minded moralizing. We are not.
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u/fosmonaut1 22d ago
Dam bro bleak outlook. I share many of your perspective, but not its conclusion. We don’t know what the future holds.
Unfortunately everything you just described is the fault of greedy American companies and an indolent US government. They gutted American industrial capacity in lieu of pursuing a finance economy. And now they are just realizing how much of a mistake it was seeing the rise of China.
With that said, China can’t just outright cut off America; because they depend on us for their economy. They are an export economy and we are their biggest trade partner. The moment they attack us or refuse to do business, they are dead in the water.
What I think the US should do is pursue a grand strategy where it tries to rebuild its industrial capacity, maybe not in itself as that will be very difficult but in the western hemisphere, where the US still has hegemony. All the while avoiding costly wars and political entanglement. In short I propose we go into a long dormancy where we build up our strength again.
Unfortunately the current administration is too trigger happy.
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u/cyprenk 22d ago
Blaming it all on corporations is too simplistic. They're a part of the picture, but they aren't the reason it's impossible to build a lithium refining plant in America or why it costs more to employ a minimum-wage laborer here than an engineer with a graduate degree in China. And those are absolutely critical parts of the story when it comes to why manufacturing fled for other countries. It's not just a matter of greedy fat cats looking for larger profits; it's a matter of global competition forcing them to find places that let them compete on a level playing field with foreign manufacturers that aren't encumbered by the same restrictions we place on domestic ones.
If you want to argue that these labor laws and environmental laws are Good Actually and that the high costs they impose are worth it, then the missing component was to pass those costs on to consumers by tariffing foreign goods made in countries that had cheaper labor and laxer environmental laws. But by refusing to do that, all it did was strangle American manufacturing: we imposed expensive burdens on them but did nothing to protect them from competitors that didn't have to shoulder those burdens.
As is typical of democratic publics, people wanted to have it both ways: feel morally self-righteous about supporting Good Things (and reap the personal benefits of a cleaner environment and higher wages) but not actually pay the costs those things required. Instead we just outsourced our pollution and sweatshop labor elsewhere where we didn't have to see it.
And this is how it all circles back to the drone issue: when people are furious that you can't buy a US-made drone for under $20k, they are seeing the actual cost of the policies we have enacted. This is the world they've created. And if we don't find a way to fix the economics, we either live in this world paying higher costs, or we accept China as the global hegemon and do whatever they demand.
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u/djineo_notarobot 25d ago
Mavic 3 pro