DJI - Mavic 2 Enterprise Series

In your budget what you'll be looking at is essentially a phone camera on a capable drone. 1/2" chip, fixed focus, nailed to a 2.8 iris and glass the size of a dime. You'd have to step up to a used Mavic 2 (1" cmos hasslebald camera) or greater for a decent sized sensor that shoots raw or log gamma.

I've basically stopped using my Mavic and use my Mini 3 Pro for most things now. Wind resistance isn't quite as good, but image quality is more than good enough and being under 250 g makes flying a lot easier (in Canada, might be different where you are). Some people assume 'bigger is better'. I've seen that in photography, where my Nikon D800 with huge lens gets more respect than a smaller camera. (So sometimes I'll being the bigger camera for show, use it for a few pictures while mostly using a smaller camera, and let people assume that the best pictures were taken with the bigger camera when in reality all the pictures came from the smaller easier-to-carry camera.)

I taped a 360 camera to a Mavic 2 and it flew fine.

An Air 3s is heavy enough to shrug off a lot of wind, and has sensors in every direction plus lidar for obstacle avoidance. You can also take off inside and fly it out through a doorway to do it's thing then it will RTH by itself through the doorway back to where it took off. The mavic 2/3s would also handle the wind but won't have such good obstacle avoidance. None of them are mini series quiet, my mini 4 pro is like a stealth drone, but they're also not avata noisy and don't get me started on the neo - damn thing is like a chihuahua when it comes to noise per pound. Doesn't sound like quiet is one of your big things though, more OA and wind handling.

Mavics are so good!

This is the hardest part for me. I use my drones for business and I’ve only had to have a replacement once when an error caused my Mavic 2 to land in a lake. BUT, flying without DJI Care or any way to get an issue fixed makes me incredibly anxious. I do have separate gear insurance that includes my drones but if new sales become prohibited, that won’t help me replace a drone.

Honestly, to the eyes of the public, the Mavic isn't much more impressive than the mini. If you want to look serious, you need an Inspire or an M300. But that's 500% overkill for OP's use cases.

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.

Is the RTK actually tagging with any kind of time accuracy on the M30 series? It doesn't on the M2EA/M3T/M4T/H20/H30...so you only get an accurate tag if the drone is hovering, which makes them useless for mapping.

If you want something like a DJI Mini/Air/Mavic, you're not going to get much from what are basically cheap knockoffs. If you want FPV pieces (frames/motors/transmitters...), or even full builds (Nazgul, BetaFPV...), AliExpress is pretty much the #1 source.

I just bought a mini 4 pro from DJI-us to do real estate work but I’m still stoked on it. I’m sure the 5 pro is better but my last drone was a Mavic 2 back in 2020 or 2021 so this 4 pro will be awesome. Thanks for sharing this pic though! Pretty cool to see

Grab a 2 they are great!

Well guys, I bought the drone 5 years ago. After a year I spent my time otherwise and didn't find the time and motivation for my drone hobby. But now I really want to start again. Well though on paper the Mavic 3 for example is better, the quality of footage you can get with the Mavic 2 today is still amazing too. What do you guys think?

I thought about selling the Mavic 2 and get the Mini 4k instead because of the new software and simplicity. But as i already got a former flagship drone I thought that might be stupid for me. But the minis are really cool!