With the release of pricing and launch time frame I had a look at the product page at DJI. According to DJI’s FAQs, the “RTK” is not meant to support mapping. The drone has what looks to be a nice IR camera, but the RGB camera is about 7 years old other than being able to digitally zoom if that is important to you.
It appears that the biggest reason to get one is for an affordable thermal platform. It would have been nice if they took the step to log accurate gps times and coordinates to images but that probably didn’t happen. The camera is sub-par for mapping compared to what is available, but if the platform had ppk prospects, that would have been nice.
I second that, but here’s the thing… Even if they elude to the fact that the RTK is just for positioning that is the whole point. The drone is more stable which it has to be writing better coordinates to the images. Unless they completely goofed again and are writing the images from a secondary less accurate GNSS module. That doesn’t make sense to me though. If they don’t provide a way to at least get the logs off the drone and base then they really dropped the ball. The base not so much if you can NTRIP to a CORS because you can get it’s logs.
The camera on the other hand is to me what makes it an inspection drone and not a mapping drone. Being able to use a mode in which the Bayer filter stitches four 12mp images makes sense for inspection, but if it is the same sensor as the Mavic Air 2 and the Autel EVO II 8K then they have already reported poor low -light performance which means your shadows will be very noisy. This and the image storage size also takes longer to write to the card. The write time kills mapping unless you do stop and shoot. Otherwise you’re mapping with a 12mp sensor.
Well, it must have the consumer grade receiver as well because the RTK unit is optional, right? When you get one to test ( ) you set it on a known point and see what coordinate it prints to the exif header!
Well, sort of. General inspection maybe. Blowing up a 12mp image to see detail is not much of an inspection. The M2Z is probably a better choice if you have the option to look at the imagery later rather than on the screen in real time. The M2EA doesn’t even record to dng.
I’m not sure it’s optional, but is removable so to your point the native GNSS is probably tagging the photos. Booooo! We need to check on the EVO II RTK because it looks awfully similar…
I think that’s the point of the 48mp “effective” size. We’ll see when someone actually gets one.
Just wow. The stock on that thing just fell 100 points.
On another note there has been a thread on the Emlid forum regarding the P4RTK and using an RS2 base station. Much better kit for PPK and yet to be tested for RTK, but with Emlid’s new NTRIP Caster it may be a possibility because you can log and RTK at the same time. P4RTK stock up 50 points.
) you set it on a known point and see what coordinate it prints to the exif header!
This is the kind of stuff that is holding us back as an industry.