DJI - Matrice 4 Series (4T/4E)

M350/M400/ Matrice 4E are the ways to go in my eyes. Mavic 3E shortly behind them, most affordable but least robust platform.

We have a dozen of the M3E and now 4 of the Matrice 4E. Over the past month we’ve compared a lot of data sets. I share the sentiment that if you already have the M3E I’m not sure I’d upgrade, but if you needed to add a drone to the fleet, I’d definitely pay the extra to get the Matrice. Feel free to DM with any specific questions.

IDK, I just got the M4E and it's pretty great. If the ban goes thru, it will only affect new offerings from DJI/ Autel. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone here will point it out)

I first flew a drone when I was 50, I'm now 52. I've gone on to get the "category Specific" (EASA) competence and is now a working commercial drone pilot/operator, both for my own drone business (mainly photo/video and various documentations (thermal and non-thermal)) and have recently been approached to potentially work regularly as a drone pilot for a large drone company offering advanced/high-end drone services, piloting Hexadrone Tundras, Matrice 300/350/400 etc. (fingers crossed!). For my own company I currently use a DJI Air 3S and a DJI Matrice 4T, but started out with a DJI Mini 4 Pro. So "yes", you most definitely can do it. I haven't crashed yet - logged about 150 flight hours in 2025. Safety first, be professional and never chance it. Good Luck!

For fields of that size I would really look at something like an M4E if you value your time. It is expensive but ludicrously fast for this type of task.

Whether it’s worth it or not is a value proposition based on time vs. money for the operator. I’m just pointing out if time is valuable, the time savings of using a drone designed for this type of capture can be very significant. I have a similar use case with sort of informal mapping that’s not done very frequently and it’s been well worth the cost to me personally.

We've been flying the Mavic 3e RTK since it came out and got a chance to fly the Matrice 4e a couple of weeks ago. I think the price difference is about $500. In terms of output quality there was no difference for mapping. Multiple flights with surface and Ortho comparison were basically indistinguishable. The 4 is a little bigger, a little more polished hardware and the software is close to identical. It wasn't a long look so I may not have dug into every feature but for mapping it theoretically has a longer flight time by a few minutes but nothing game changing. My impression was it had more features related to inspection and things other than mapping. It also has some questionable complications like a password for the base yet an easily found way to get that password. The base portion is definitely more sophisticated and I really didn't get an opportunity to work with it much. They added the ability to save the base location which is a nice feature to have since we had that ability on regular receivers 20 years ago. All in all it's the future with DJI but I wouldn't get one to replace the very capable 3e like we did compared to the 4 RTK. YMMV.

M4e has a way better remote and I just love it

Given what you seem to think is cool, I'm thinking you might love the Matrice 4T 😉

I like mine as well 😁 And the P1 is such a beast of a photogrammetry camera!

Hei! I think you've been looking at the wrong case! The Matrice 4T comes in a rather compact case without wheels. The M30T (and M300/350) are much larger, and come with a charging case on top of the drone case. I have the M4E and it's brilliant, I'm sure you'd love the M4T. I had an M2EA (which is really similar to the M3T), and it wasn't nearly as nice.

Hei! I think you've been looking at the wrong case! The Matrice 4T comes in a rather compact case without wheels. The M30T (and M300/350) are much larger, and come with a charging case on top of the drone case. I have the M4E and it's brilliant, I'm sure you'd love the M4T. I had an M2EA (which is really similar to the M3T), and it wasn't nearly as nice.

The Matrice 4T isn't usable for mapping, as the camera is crap and the geotag no well synchronized. The 4E is great, and you can do 1km² easily on 1 battery (and 35min). Still, that's not great for 60km². No drone is going to be a great option for such areas. Look at fixed wings like the Wintra or the Quantum Systems Trinity Pro.

I would really recommend spending the money on the Mavic 3E or even Matrice 4E. Ask around your department, there's a good chance that other projects could make use of it, and would split the cost. We went through this at my university a few years ago, and banned the purchase of drones outside of the DroneLab, so the DroneLab can get proper equipment that projects can rent for cheap. Having 4 Air 3S flying 4 times a year costs as much as having a M3E flying 12 times a year, and everybody gets better data.

"10x faster than quadcopters, flies at 22m/s"...so 1x faster than a Matrices 4E? Also love the whole comparison section that is just pure lies. And comparing to N-1 gen products.

All their comparisons have sources like "yeah we lied". How is the MAP61 camera much better than a DJI P1 or even the one on the M4E?

The M3E and M4E aren't that different if you only care about the main camera. There are a few gimmicks in the M4E that make it shine, but if you're doing nadir photogrammetry, nothing of great value. It flies a bit longer and a bit faster, so you can cover more land in one flight, and the smart oblique (taking nadir and 4 oblique angles in a single flight) and smart ortho (taking nadir and side obliques to reduce the number of necessary flight lines) are cool though.

I don't think I'd consider upgrading an M3E to M4E. But if I was starting from scratch, getting the M4E guarantees a much longer support life, and potentially new features, while the M3E is most likely on its retirement firmware. I upgraded from M2EA+P4RTK to M4E and that was magical.

And the UX is much better. The P4's controller (physically, but mostly the app) feels like it's from last century.

If the constraint is speed + precision, I don't think photogrammetry is the best way to go. From a distance it looks like a good idea, but don't forget that going from photogrammetry to geospatial data requires a lot of processing, which will take a long time if we're talking about a volume of 20km of road. Furthermore, no, precision is achievable with a good drone like the M3E M4E M350..., but to ensure/justify precision you'll need to set up GCP (i.e. place targets on the ground that you'll survey using GPS) before the flight. So in the end I'm not really convinced that the time saving is there. For trees, yes, it's a problem, but if the roads are of normal width, a drone flying at 10/15m to stay under the canopy will easily be able to take the full-width road. If your markets are large and mainly road-based, consider the option of vehicle-mounted lidar, or vehicle-mounted slam. You'll get speed, live point clouds and precision. But it's expensive.

Well soooo cattle or at least mine can be scary or silly stuff one moment and then the next stubborn AF! I use drones to find lost heads or round up one or two strays sometimes but moving a herd isn't going to happen anymore they have gotten used to me flying around them. But it could work for him... You might get a Matrice 4T