The Best Drones for Photos and Video

If you’re an aspiring aerial photographer or videographer, drones are your ticket to the sky. Here are The Best Drones cheap, lightweight marvels provide perspectives that you’d otherwise be able to re-create only with expensive equipment such as cranes or dollies, which is why they’ve become a staple of many online creators’ gear lists.

But you can find dozens of different models—sometimes even from a single brand—with various costs and benefits to sift through. After test-flying 36 best drones, we’ve concluded that the DJI Air 3S is the best because it combines a high-quality main camera, a useful telephoto camera, and the latest autonomous technology in a light-enough and relatively affordable package.

The Best Drones we recommend

The DJI Air 3S is one of the best drones and is easy to fly, has an ample stated battery life of 45 minutes (backed up in our testing), and is equipped with two cameras, giving you options for more varied and interesting shots than its predecessor. We recommend buying the Air 3S as part of DJI’s Fly More Combo because it’s the only package that also includes the DJI RC 2 controller, which features a built-in screen and is a marked improvement over the standard controller’s reliance on your phone’s screen for live view.

Like the older Air 3, the Air 3S can sense and avoid obstacles approaching from all directions, but it adds a front-facing lidar sensor, making it better at avoiding obstacles in low-light situations. These new sensing abilities make the ActiveTrack feature, which directs the drone to autonomously follow and film a subject while also avoiding obstacles, easier to use in more situations.

It can hold its position steadily, even in moderate winds, so you can focus on your cinematography. And it can go with you almost anywhere: Measuring 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches folded and weighing roughly 1.5 pounds, the Air 3S fits well in most standard-size backpacks.

If you’re just getting into drone photography, especially for personal use, the DJI Mini 3 is one of the best drones as a fantastic starter package. Though it costs less than half as much as our top pick, it still offers a 4K camera, a long (38-minute) battery life, and a compact, lightweight build that just slides under the FAA’s 250-gram limit.

The Mini 3’s camera and sensor aren’t as high-quality as those of the Air 3S, but the f/1.7 aperture provides surprisingly good image quality in lower-light conditions.

This model also comes with all the important features you need from a video drone, such as image and flight stabilization, an included controller, and smart flight modes, in which the drone flies itself to easily capture cinematic shots. But it lacks the obstacle-avoidance sensors of more expensive models.

You have the option to extend the battery life to 51 minutes via DJI’s Intelligent Flight Battery Plus, but using that add-on makes the drone heavy enough that it would need to be registered with the FAA.

All of our picks are capable of capturing good-looking, high-resolution aerial footage. But while the others focus on smooth cinematic shots of landscapes or sweeping vistas, the DJI Avata 2 is designed to emphasize speed and agility, creating footage that makes you feel as if you’re riding onboard.

This small, buzzy fighter jet—DJI’s third iteration of its first-person-view drone—finally puts the FPV format inside an easily accessible and relatively practical package. It’s equipped with a 1/1.3-inch sensor that shoots 4K footage at up to 100 frames per second, motors that can propel it at up to 27 meters per second (in contrast to the Air 3S and Mavic 3 Pro’s 21 meters per second), and a sturdy plastic shell that can handle a wide range of impacts when you inevitably run it into a tree or wall.

The Fly More Combo that we recommend includes an updated headset, three batteries good for roughly 20 minutes of flight time each, and a new, smaller version of the motion controller that launched with the original DJI FPV drone. This upgraded controller makes flying more intuitive for new pilots, but if you want to unlock the more aggressive manual control mode, you should also have DJI’s more traditional FPV Remote Controller 3.

If you are avoiding the DJI brand due to security or human-rights concerns, or if you want a 6K camera, we recommend the Autel Robotics Evo Lite+.

This drone can fly for up to 40 minutes with autonomous options similar to those of DJI drones. And unlike the DJI Fly app, the Autel Sky app is available for direct download from the Google Play store.

However, we still prefer DJI best drones we believe they are the best drones for their value and image quality.

How we picked and tested

After reading both professional reviews and owner reviews, and speaking to best drones enthusiasts, experts, and manufacturers at the CES trade show, we considered the following criteria while looking for best drones to test:

• Quadcopter design: Drones with a quadcopter shape (or alternatives, such as hexacopters, that add more arms) produce the most stable photo and video because they can steadily hold their position in the air.
• Crash-avoidance sensors: Many modern best drones have sensors that detect obstacles approaching in any direction and can avoid them. We prefer drones with this technology, as it removes a lot of stress for new flyers, but most budget options lack these features, so we make exceptions for best drones under $500.
• High-quality camera: Generally, the more you pay for a photography drone, the better the camera it has. We consider only those models that can shoot at least 12-megapixel photos and capture smooth 4K video.
• Three-axis gimbal: A good gimbal stabilizes an attached camera with accelerometers and gyroscopes even when you are flying in wind or a jerky pattern, and it’s essential if you want usable footage.
• Long battery life: Longer-lasting batteries tend to be larger and weigh more, so manufacturers try to balance best drones size with battery life. But a shorter flight time means fewer shots, shorter videos, and less flexibility. We prefer drone batteries that last at least 30 minutes, and we recommend that pilots pick up a few extras so that they can spend more time flying.
• Autonomous modes: Any video with the best drones worth buying has a fail-safe return-home mode that automatically brings the aircraft back to the launch point when you press a button or when the drone loses contact with the controller. Additionally, we prefer drones that come preprogrammed with cinematic autonomous flight modes; with the touch of a button, you can tell a drone to follow you while you snowboard down a mountain, for instance, or fly in a circle while filming you for a dramatic selfie.
• Portability: The best drones are portable enough to be an everyday tool, as they’re small and light enough to fit into a camera bag or backpack.
• Long flight range: Federal rules say that you must always keep a drone within your line of sight. But in special cases, a best drones ability to fly an especially long distance without losing contact with a controller can be a useful feature.
• Intuitive controller: Most best drones controllers have two joysticks for controlling flight and a smattering of buttons for specific tasks, as well as a spot for mounting a smartphone to deliver the video feed and allow the pilot to use various smart flight modes. Some controllers, such as the DJI RC, come with a built-in screen; though convenient, this feature isn’t strictly necessary.

To test each best drones, we shot photos and videos to evaluate camera quality; the process also helped us to gauge stabilization ability and to see whether propellers appeared in any of the shots.

In addition, we tried all of the advertised intelligent flight modes and crash-avoidance systems by flying the drones through trees. We tested maneuverability and controller sensitivity by flying fast, with lots of turns.

We’ll continue to send our picks up in a variety of weather conditions, and we’ll update this guide if we find that they struggle or excel in certain circumstances.

Top pick: DJI Air 3S – Best Drone

The best drone for aerial photos and videos

DJI Air 3S

This drone offers impressive value, combining the 360-degree obstacle avoidance of the more expensive DJI Mavic 3 Pro with two fantastic cameras.

The DJI Air 3S is one the best drones for budding aerial photographers and videographers because it provides automated obstacle avoidance and two high-quality cameras, while also offering overall ease of use. Although our upgrade pick, the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, gives you even better camera quality and battery life, the Air 3S is impressive enough to please most people—for half the price.

It avoids obstacles with ease. The Air 3S can detect obstacles as they approach—from any direction—and then make flight-path adjustments to avoid them. It is also the first consumer-level DJI drone to incorporate lidar, which can detect objects that aren’t visible to the camera-based sensors—in this case added to the front of the drone.

When we deliberately tried to fly the Air 3S straight at a tree or slam it into the ground during the day, the drone emitted a loud beep and stopped itself or simply continued around the obstacle. And when we launched the best drones at night and flew it directly at a fence hidden in deep shadow, it beeped at us again and stopped well before making contact, showing that the lidar sensor works as expected.

This 360-degree obstacle avoidance also allows for a more robust ActiveTrack feature, which directs the drone to follow a subject or yourself. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but in our testing it never ended up running the best drones sideways into a tree (which has been known to happen with previous models).

In general, obstacle sensing removes stress from the flying experience, both when you’re flying manually and when you’re using DJI’s preprogrammed or autonomous-flight options, which is why we’re so happy to see the tech trickle down from the Mavic Pro series.

The two-camera system is versatile and high-quality. The Air 3S’s main camera has a 24mm-equivalent, f/1.8 lens with a large, 1-inch sensor—the same size found in our top point-and-shoot camera pick—and a wide, f/1.8 aperture, meaning it’s capable of producing clearer images in difficult low-light situations than competing best drones. The footage we were able to capture during testing was as crisp and as high-quality as we expected.

The 70mm-equivalent telephoto camera is mounted just above the main camera and has a smaller, 1/1.3-inch sensor with a f/2.8 aperture. That camera doesn’t capture as much detail in low light as the main camera does, but its longer focal length provides additional flexibility in shot composition and can give a different look from the type that best drones videographers have grown used to with models in this price range.

In our tests, the Air 3S’s video was crisp, without any post-shoot color-balancing required, though we still preferred the colors that came out of the Mavic 3 Pro’s Hasselblad camera.

It handles gusty conditions with aplomb. While flying in winds measured at about 14 mph, the Air 3S was unfailingly stable. It didn’t drift, and it consistently recorded steady video, even when it rose above the tree line.

Other, comparably sized DJI best drones we tested performed similarly, but the newer Flip and every Mini-series drone were more affected by wind. Like many best drones, the Air 3S uses a combination of Galileo, GPS, and BeiDou satellites, as well as its vision cameras, to monitor movement and altitude changes.

The battery lasts long enough. With a stated battery life of up to 45 minutes—a claim borne out in the course of our testing—the Air 3S can capture plenty of footage and still have enough battery life left to travel back home. And even though its 42 GB of internal storage is a welcome upgrade over the Air 3’s 8 GB, you’ll still probably want to add a microSD card for most flights.

DJI’s automated-flight modes are great (in certain situations). Of the handful of modes, we most often used ActiveTrack, which is good enough to stay with a walking subject, occasionally has trouble keeping up with a subject on a bike, and tends to get left behind by anything faster than that.

In QuickShots mode, the Air 3S can autonomously film elaborate cinematic shots, such as circling around a subject or zooming away from it. A mode called MasterShots combines several filming effects and then creates a short video for you. It wasn’t particularly useful in our testing, but it might be instructive for newer pilots familiarizing themselves with the visual vocabulary of best drones cinematography.

It’s compact and lightweight. The Air 3S measures 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches when folded—about the size of a large coffee thermos—and weighs 1.6 pounds. The RC 2 controller that comes with it in DJI’s Fly More Combo is a little bigger than a slice of bread and about twice as thick. You can slip both into a camera bag easily or stow them in a purse or backpack.

It has great range. The Air 3S is capable of flying up to 12 miles away, though federal regulations say that you must keep a best drones within your line of sight, so it’s safe to say that you’ll rarely test that range. It transmits video and remote-controller data via DJI’s OccuSync 4.0 system, which we’ve found to be reliable.

DJI’s controller software is robust. You can use DJI’s Fly app—which comes ready to use on the RC 2 controller—for drone calibration, camera settings, GPS maps, and intelligent flight modes. It also tracks all of your flight information (which you can replay if you’re trying to repeat a shot), warns you about any flight restrictions in the area, and offers built-in video-editing tools, which you can use on the controller itself or through the mobile app on your phone.

The controller is easy to use. In our tests, the drone responded nimbly to our commands, even while flying in its faster and more agile Sport mode. We also had no difficulty adjusting the tilt of the drone’s camera with the controller’s built-in wheel and pressing the dedicated buttons that prompt the camera to take a picture or start filming.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• DJI products come with security considerations. Like other Chinese brands, DJI has come under scrutiny from the US government and security researchers regarding security concerns. In addition, Android users have to download the DJI Fly app from DJI’s website instead of the Google Play store. We’ve included a few notes about the security and privacy of DJI drones below.
• Its camera sensor isn’t the largest in DJI’s range. The Air 3S has a smaller camera sensor than the Mavic 3 Pro. Its videos looked sharp enough for posting to YouTube and social media, but the Mavic 3 Pro’s videos looked even clearer, with better colors, so that camera might be a better choice for professional video production.