I use the Mavic Pro for commercial stills and video. The consensus I’m seeing says the Air makes the Pro obsolete. I don’t get it. The Air has a slower lens (2.8 versus 2.2) with less ISO range (1600 versus 3200). I’m not concerned about noise at the high end of the ISO range – that’s what Neat is for. The field-of-view is wider on the Air (24mm versus 28mm equivalent), adding more spherical aberration. The Air has HDR, which you won’t use if you shoot RAW. On the video side, the Air has a one-stop frame rate improvement at 2.7K, but you get the same result by shooting an ND filter on the MP. No difference at 4K. The Air has a higher bitrate (100 Mbps burst), but even at the 60 Mbps of the Mavic Pro you’re throttled by the write speed of your SD card i.e. looks like an improvement on paper but no real world benefit. The Air has no OcuSync, less range, and shorter flight time. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great for what it is, but why would I replace my MP with it? I’m not trolling, I’m genuinely asking if there’s something I’m not understanding that’s leading people to say the Air is superior to the Mavic Pro.
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