I posted an earlier thread under Smart Controller elsewhere, but reposting here under Mavic 2 Pro as I have narrowed the problem to being the drone now. It's a Mavic 2 Pro about a year old working with a Smart Controller. Never been crashed, and no physical damage, the worst it has seen is a bit of long grass being cut with the rotors on landing, and it's always transported in a padded waterproof case.


My video feed from the drone has frequent white flashes on the screen (every 1-2 seconds), the colours are washed out and there are vertical lines and generally poor picture quality. As soon as you press the camera button to take a photo the video feed locks (sometimes it just freezes, sometimes turns black and white as if the drone was turned off) and it stays like that until you power the drone off and on again. If you try and take a video it thinks about it for a couple of seconds, sometimes the screen goes blank and sometimes it comes back to photo again. Nothing happened to the drone, one day it worked, I put it in the padded case and the next time I went to use it a couple of days later, it didn't work.


I have reset to factory settings on both controller and drone, refreshed the drone firmware with DJI Assistant 2 for Mavic, and upgraded the Smart Controller to the latest firmware released a few days ago, but there is no difference. I still have the original controller which I have never used, paired this with a Samsung phone and tried it and the flashing and freezing is exactly the same so I am now fairly certain that the issue is in the drone not in the controller. I have searched in many places and see others who describe a similar problem but I haven't found anything that really says what causes it. I have attached a couple of screen grabs off a short video I recorded showing the white-out flash and the vertical distortion lines in the picture that you see between the flashes. Flight controls work normally most of the time and all the expected behaviours of the drone itself are normal, just the video feed is messed up.






Is there anything else I could try and can do as the end user, or is this basically the end of the road? I live in a small remote country (Falkland Islands) and there is nobody here who can repair it, I have emailed Drone Doctor in the UK but not had a response. I bought it for photography so although it still flies perfectly, it isn't much use to me unfortunately... it's only about a year old but just out of warranty.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Theres a similar thread over on the mavicpilots forum with a similar fault,  the last post suggests you need a new cable to the camera/gimbal.  - https://mavicpilots.com/threads/ ... -mavic-2-pro.63418/

DAFlys Posted at 1-14 01:36
Theres a similar thread over on the mavicpilots forum with a similar fault,  the last post suggests you need a new cable to the camera/gimbal.  - https://mavicpilots.com/threads/white-flashes-in-video-from-mavic-2-pro.63418/

Thanks, the video in the first post shows almost exactly what mine is doing (the flashes on mine sometimes have more digital noise in them and the picture has more distortion). It's odd as the camera otherwise seems to operate normally, having taken it out and chucked around doing some hard turns in a strong wind the gimbal operation is faultless and smooth but maybe there is an issue with whatever cable transmits the video feed as I guess it is shifting a lot of data. I did see something about gimbal cable replacement the other day but I think I'll just fire it off for repair in case it is something else - it doesn't seem that any amount of upgrading, downgrading or yelling at it is likely to fix it.

Thanks for your reply.

BogMonster Posted at 1-14 02:15
Thanks, the video in the first post shows almost exactly what mine is doing (the flashes on mine sometimes have more digital noise in them and the picture has more distortion). It's odd as the camera otherwise seems to operate normally, having taken it out and chucked around doing some hard turns in a strong wind the gimbal operation is faultless and smooth but maybe there is an issue with whatever cable transmits the video feed as I guess it is shifting a lot of data. I did see something about gimbal cable replacement the other day but I think I'll just fire it off for repair in case it is something else - it doesn't seem that any amount of upgrading, downgrading or yelling at it is likely to fix it.

Thanks for your reply.

The cable on eBay is between £10 and £15 so hopefully it wont be an expensive repair.