WOW, what a machine. To say that we are in love with this drone would be an understatement. The new Mavic is all-time, longer battery life and the zoom function, oh the zoom function. Time for a little bit of nerd talk, the lens has a focal range of 24-48mm, what the hell does that mean? It means you can shoot super wide to nice and close, the nice and close is amazing for shooting surfing action (we might do a bit of that) because the drone doesn’t have to be dangerously close to the water to get close to the action. We’ve heard stories of drones being nailed by surfers spray and if you’ve seen the buckets that someone like Wade Carmichael throws, you can see why.
The practical side of this bad boy. It’s tough. Bloody tough. They say you’re not a true drone operator until you’ve crashed one, well we’ve crashed one, at about 40kms per hour into dry coral on the beach in the Ments. It was a hard landing to say the least, but it was still going and it handled the rougher than normal landing extremely well. The front limbs folded back on impact which took out most of the force of the crash landing. The gimbal was unaffected and one of the props flew off but was easily clipped straight back on and put back to work.
The fact that we travel a lot with this job means we need a small footprint when it comes to luggage, we are carrying surfboards as well and I don’t have to tell you how important they are. The Mavic 2 folds down super small and is nice and hardy. We grabbed a specific bag for it and then that simply dropped into our backpack.
Would recommend this drone … would I ever.