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The DJI Mavic 4 Pro drone is something special – I'd buy it just for the mind-blowing tilt and rotate camera tricks
The ability to look up, look down and to be able to rotate the three DJI Mavic 4 Pro cameras is truly mind-blowing.
I’ve been flying and shooting with the DJI Mavic 4 Pro for a few weeks, and it's one of the best drones I've ever piloted with stand out camera features: the ability of the camera to be tilted up to 70 degrees, so it’s almost looking straight up, and for the entire camera housing to be rotated 90 degrees to capture photos and videos in vertical format.
Furthermore, the camera can be rotated through -40 to 400 degrees on the roll axis, which means you can continuously rotate the camera during video capture. Think dynamic Inception-style twists that add a dynamic and creative look to videos.
These movements are absolutely incredible because the camera unit on the Mavic 4 Pro isn’t small – it’s the largest seen on any Mavic drone, housing a superb 28mm Four Thirds Hasselblad camera with an adjustable aperture, a 70mm camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor and a 168mm camera with a 1/1.5in sensor.
Being armed with three versatile camera movements naturally opens up many creative possibilities for photo and video capture. After all, many pilots use drones to mimic traditional crane-mounted and dolly-style camera movements, to capture smooth and fluid video without the need to own, hire or set up such large and heavy equipment.
True vertical photo capture with a high-quality Four Thirds camera or one of the telephoto cameras, on the other hand, speeds up photography at both the capture and editing stages. Say goodbye to the hassle of shooting and editing vertical panoramas for portrait shots or cropping landscape format photos to portrait, where you ultimately lose pixels and image quality.
The camera's hugely versatile range of movement on the roll axis is thanks to what DJI calls an 'Infinity Gimbal' with 360-degree rotation. The effect is achieved by pressing button C1 and turning the right shoulder dial on the controller, and has never been seen before on a drone.
A whopping 160 degrees of camera tilt
This video shows the full 160 degrees of tilt, and the degree of movement is super impressive. Other DJI drones can have their cameras tilted upwards, but it’s only the DJI Air 3S that comes close to this with 60 degrees of upwards tilt.
The Mavic 4 Pro gimbal is understandably robust since the camera unit is quite large, but it has a controllable tilt range of -90 to 70 degrees, which allows it to be pointed straight down at the ground as well as almost straight up.
When capturing video and tilting the camera up or down throughout its full tilt range, it takes 15 seconds to travel 160 degrees at the default gimbal speed. 160 degrees of camera movement doesn’t sound like much on paper, but when you see it, you can fully appreciate it.
Vertical capture with 90 degrees rotation
With the Mavic 4 Pro, you can capture cropped vertical video with the camera kept in landscape format in the same way that the DJI Air 3 models capture vertical video. This works perfectly well, however the Mavic 4 Pro goes one step better: you can also rotate the camera 90 degrees for vertical video, without sacrificing pixels.
During my testing, I found that the drone sometimes flew much slower than normal when capturing vertical video with the cameras rotated, but not always. This may have been because I was unaware of shooting settings that might have changed this, or it could have been a quirk of the pre-release firmware.
The main camera can capture cropped vertical video in 4K up to 60fps, while the two telephotos can capture cropped vertical video in 2.7K up to 60fps. With the gimbal rotated, the full resolution possible with the main camera is 6K up to 60fps video, while the 70mm can capture up to 4K at 120fps and the 168mm up to 4K at 100fps.
Never before seen 'Infinity Gimbal'
The Infinity Gimbal with -40 to 400 degree continuous rotation on the roll axis is another string to the Mavic 4 Pro's versatile camera bow.
The 90 degree rotation for vertical video and photos is handy for social cuts, the versatile 160 degree range of tilt motion gets you looking-up perspectives previously not possible, but it's the Infinity Gimbal that provides dynamic camera movements, especially if you love the Inception effect – you can see a short example I shot, below.
The Mavic 3 Pro was already my favorite prosumer camera drone, but the DJI Mavic 4 Pro is an even more versatile offering, with longer flight times. Those three handy camera movements complement the triple cameras for an unparalleled degree of creative camera work, and should cement the Mavic 4 Pro's place in best drone buying guides for some time to come.
