Review: DJI Air 3S

WIRED loved 2023’s DJI Air 3 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). The midrange consumer drone was easy and safe to fly and compact enough to carry almost anywhere, but I found the most appealing feature to be its innovative dual-camera setup. By packing both wide-angle and medium telephoto cameras (each with its own 1/1.3-inch CMOS sensor), it expanded my creative options for aerial photos and video. I could shoot wide vistas one moment, then switch to the telephoto lens to get closer to a particular feature of the landscape or compress it against the background for more dramatic framing.

The new DJI Air 3S takes the concept a step further by increasing the sensor size of the wide-angle camera to a full inch, which improves dynamic range and low-light image quality. It also adds built-in SSD storage for photos and videos and boosts its spatial awareness courtesy of front-facing lidar sensors (while retaining the Air 3’s vision-based sensors for other directions), enabling it to spot and avoid obstacles more easily.

Photograph: Sam Kielsden

The DJI Air 3S maintains the compact dimensions of the Air 3, and when not in use and folded down, it’s about the size of a 16-ounce (500-mililiter) water bottle. This isn’t one of the smallest or lightest DJI drones around. The company’s new Neo model is tiny, while its Mini line offers decent camera performance in an 8.7-ounce (249-gram) drone that can be legally flown almost anywhere.

Weighing the Options

At 25.5 ounces (724 grams), roughly the same as the Air 3, the Air 3S falls into a trickier category of aircraft that, depending on where you live in the world, requires a bit more effort to get in the air. I don’t mean in the sense of flying—in fact it couldn’t be any easier to take off, pilot around, and land—but in the level of paperwork required. Pilots in the US using it for recreational purposes will need to register it with the Federal Aviation Administration and obtain its Trust certificate by passing an online test. In the EU and UK, things are, sadly, a little more involved, with pilots having to undertake a paid (around £100) online course and pass a rather more stringent exam. Pass it and they’ll be permitted to fly it closer than 4,902 feet (150 meters) to built-up areas or public parks; even after passing that, they will need to keep the Air 3S 164 feet (50 meters) or more horizontally away from people.

Photograph: Sam Kielsden

As a UK resident currently without the certificate, I had to be quite careful where I flew the Air 3S. Living on the coast at least meant I was able to fly it out over the sea, where it could easily be kept the requisite distance from people, buildings, parks, and beaches. If I lived in the middle of a large town or city here, however, I’d find the restrictions too frustrating to deal with and opt for an ultra-lightweight, fly-anywhere drone such as the DJI Mini 4 Pro. I suspect most casual drone users feel the same way.

Twice as Nice

Those who decide to pass the courses and deal with the paperwork will enjoy excellent rewards for their time, patience, and money. If the older Air 3’s camera performance was impressive, the Air 3S’s is stunning. The new 1-inch sensor delivers 14 stops of dynamic range and excels in challenging lighting, producing detail-rich, low-noise images at dusk and even at night. I shot the sample photos (above) in DNG RAW (the wide-angle camera shoots 50-megapixel stills; the telephoto 48-megapixel) and edited them using Adobe Lightroom, while the sample video was captured in 10-bit D-Log M and color graded and corrected with DaVinci Resolve Studio. I had a blast editing the footage, with the 10-bit original files offering a huge amount of scope to work with. You don’t have to shoot in D-Log M, however; the cameras support standard color profiles in both 8- and 10-bit quality and 10-bit HLG.

There’s a wide selection of superb video and photo options available. While the Air 3S can’t shoot 5.7K footage (something offered by the DJI Mavic 3 Pro), it can shoot regular 4K videos at up to 60 fps, 4K slow-motion clips at 120 fps and Full HD slow-motion clips at 240 fps. It can also shoot 9:16 portrait-format videos, ideal for quick posting to social media channels, at a more than acceptable 2.7K resolution and 60 fps.

I wouldn’t call the cameras perfect, of course. The lack of adjustable apertures makes a set of neutral density (ND) filters almost a compulsory purchase for anyone shooting video during the day, and even then, changing the filters is a fiddly process. Hopefully that’s one upgrade we’ll see DJI introduce with the Air 4, whenever it arrives.

Photograph: Sam Kielsden

Flight-wise, the Air 3S keeps things beautifully simple. Like most DJI drones, there’s automatic takeoff and landing and return-to-home functions, while omnidirectional object detection makes it very hard to crash into something, even when wind resistance is strong. I used the touchscreen-equipped twin-stick RC 2 controller, which links in seconds and offers brilliantly robust transmission for responsive controls and a clear, stable, live video feed; it reacts quickly and reliably to your inputs and is a pleasure to fly. A fully charged battery provides over 40 minutes of flight time, which gave me plenty of time to get the shots I was looking for, without the need to rush things.

If you already own a DJI Air 3, the new Air 3S’s improvements probably aren't transformative enough to warrant an immediate upgrade. However, anyone used to single-camera drones will appreciate the creativity-enhancing bump up to two offered here. With its all-round flight performance, long battery life, and camera quality, the Air 3S is every bit the modern enthusiast-ready, user-friendly consumer drone. I just caution users to be aware that its weight does mean they will have to be very careful where they fly it, at least compared to a sub-250-gram alternative.