DJI Inspire 3 Unboxing, First Flight, and Impressions!

So, this has got to be the largest unboxing that we’ve done here on the channel. We’ve got DJI’s brand new DJI Inspire 3 and all the accessories that come with this drone. In this video, we’ll be unboxing this drone, checking out what comes inside of the kits, and then we’ll be taking our very first flight with the Inspire 3, which I am super pumped to do.

Alright, so I figured we’d start with the actual drone itself, the Inspire 3, which is inside of this case. This case came inside of the larger brown box, but I did that part of the unboxing kind of off-screen and off-camera because it was so large and cumbersome to do in this small space. Nonetheless, this case came inside of that brown box. That’s typically how DJI will ship their larger drones, like their DJI Matrice drones and, of course, their DJI Inspire drones. The actual box itself is the box that ships in, and then the case is protected inside of that box.

I just want to say, right off the bat, that this case is amazing. Typically, DJI does a really good job at coming out with good cases, and kind of like good bags to come with their drones, but this is a step above anything I’ve seen them do for their drones. It’s to be expected because this is an Inspire, right? This is the new generation of Inspire, so of course, they need to give it a great case to go with a great drone.

Just to kind of point out some things right off the bat, first of all, the build quality is great. It’s very rigid; there’s no flex in the actual case itself. We also have some reinforced corners on the edges here. Also, we have four sets of wheels, so you can kind of carry it any way like a suitcase; you can kind of carry it straight up or right behind you if you wanted to. You also have kind of like some ridges on the backside here if we set it down on its side. I’m definitely going to kind of do a more in-depth look at this case, just took it out of the box, but I do want to say right off the bat, huge props to them for giving us a great, usable case to use right off the bat.

Now, I will also say that it comes with these locks on the front here, right? Not only are these two pieces that will ensure that it stays clamped down, but you can actually lock these right within the case as well. It’s built right in. That is a great feature for a drone that is very expensive.

DJI Inspire 3 unboxing

So, what do you say? Hey, why don’t we crack this drone case open for the very first time?

So, we’ll flip these open and do the grand reveal. Voila! There it is. That thing is so sweet. So, right off the bat, I can see we’ve got three sets of batteries, so six total batteries here. We also have, of course, the drone itself, we’ve got some propellers, we’ve got the controller, we’ve got the charging hub here, we’ve got some extra cables and cords down here, two cases, one of which, I would assume, this case I think, is for the lenses. That’s empty because the lens came in another box. We also have the, I would say, camera. Yeah, so that’s the X9 Air camera right there. We’ve also got the SSD inside of here. So everything comes shipped inside of the case, ready to go.

So, why don’t we push this over to the side and actually look at each of these pieces individually? Alright, so how about the first thing we do is get out some of these smaller accessories, and then we’ll take out the actual drone itself.

So, first of all, we’ll kind of start with these two cases. The first of which is the lens case. So, this is empty as of right now because we don’t have any lenses again. That came in another box, but it’s nice to see you can fit lenses inside of this nice sturdy case. So that is case number one.

And then we have case number two. This is the X9 8K Air, the full-frame beast camera that it comes with, which is inside of here. So here’s the grand unveiling. That thing is huge. Okay, so there’s the camera, X9 Air. We’ll get more into this shortly.

Let’s put both of those cases off to the side. Let’s see, we’ve also got the RC Plus here, which seems to be a little bit different since I last saw this controller. So, I reviewed the M30T, and it just seems a little bit different, like they’ve upgraded it in a sense, but we’ll get more into that of course as we fly the actual drone.

So we’ve got lens case, X9 Air case, and the camera itself, as well as the RC Plus. Let’s see, we’ve got six total batteries. So these are the new batteries, they are calling them, not sure, TB something, right? So we’ve got six of these batteries here, but remember, this drone uses two batteries per flight, so we’re going to be able to slide both of them in for redundancy.

These are actually small and very lightweight, which is awesome. I’d love to maybe see, and again this is just going off of me unboxing the drone for the first time, maybe like a high-capacity battery, right? Like maybe something that’s bigger than this because these are surprisingly lightweight. So, we’ve got one set there, we’ve got two sets here, and then finally we have the third set. It looks like we can hold ten total batteries, so five total flights, inside of this case.

Now, let’s see, we also have some propellers around the outside. These propellers are huge, of course, so we’ve got four total propellers here that are stored on the right side, and then we have some extra propellers stored here on the left side. They’re of course individually wrapped inside of their bag.

In this top section up here, we have some paperwork and documentation, pretty standard stuff. Alright, so I actually thought this was a case right off the bat, but this is the actual lanyard or harness that you use to actually strap around you to hold the controller. That’s going to be nice to use because the controller is a little bit larger.

We have some fresheners, some packaging stuff inside of here. We’ll put those over to the side. This looks like a big mess of just cords and stuff. It looks like a bunch of different adapters, USB-C cables and stuff like that, so we’ll crack this open here in a second, but I am just going to put that off to the side.

Not the final thing that we have actually, on the top side here we have our charging hub right here. This is a lot larger than I expected, but I’ll tell you what, the build quality of that is phenomenal. Everything from the closing to the opening, it has a lot of weight to it.

It looks like we have the charging hub here, there’s a spot for it up there, there’s actually spots for two charging hubs, which is nice because you can actually go and be charging a bunch of batteries all at once because, as we know, this drone will be eating up a good amount of battery. We’ve got the charging hub here.

There’s one more thing up at the top. This looks like a little tool, so this tool could be, looks like a little screwdriver, so this could be for a propeller, this could be for doing any sort of maintenance to the drone. So we’ve got a screwdriver here. Okay, and I think that’s it.

DJI Inspire 3 drone

So now, for the final thing, right, the actual drone itself. Man, it’s just like I remember the Inspire 2, such a beast drone. Again, not much has changed about the actual styling of the drone. I’ll spin it around here, but it’s more over the technology, right? Like the obstacle avoidance, the transmission system, the camera that it carries. The design is the same. I think the design is great, but it’s the actual internals, the drone itself, that gets a massive upgrade.

Alright, so I went ahead and laid out everything all nice and neat. This is everything that comes inside of the box when you purchase the Inspire 3. We, of course, have the drone itself as well as the one terabyte Pro SSD here from DJI. So this, of course, goes right in the top section of the drone with a nice satisfying click. So, that sits in there to record all of the video that you capture.

We have the charging hub, we have a case for our lenses, we have the actual camera itself, which, why don’t we pop this open and take a closer look at it? So, inside of here we have the X9 8K Air, which is just a beast of a camera. Of course, we’re going to be taking a much closer look at the footage that this shoots shortly when we actually fly the drone. So the camera is inside of that small case right there.

Moving over, we have some power cables for the charging hub, we have some cables that also came with the drone, and a tool here, a screwdriver. So, this is a USB-C to USB-C and a USB-A to USB-C. The USB-C has this nice braided texture to it.

Let’s see, we also have the harness that comes for the controller, we’ve got the controller, we’ve got six total batteries, three sets of batteries, and then we have six total propellers. So, we’ve got four that go on the actual drone itself and two that are extra.

Now, we’ve got three more boxes that came in this shipment. The other two longer boxes that are just sitting here next to me are just some RTK equipment like tripods, the ground station, things like that. I think I’m just going to unbox those off camera because we got the meat and potatoes out of the way of actually unboxing the Inspire 3 for itself.

Inside of here, we have some accessories as well to go along with it. So we have another support kit for the RC Plus, as well as another controller here. So, we’re going to be able to fly dual operator here. We’ve got the support system, as well as the actual controller itself. Inside of here, we also have some batteries for the RC Plus.

So remember, the RC Plus, if I can hold on to them, actually takes an external battery, as well as having an internal battery, so you can continue to swap those out. We also have a charging hub for those batteries that go inside of the RC Plus, and finally, we have an 18-millimeter lens here to use with the Inspire 3.

That means that, for the time being, I am just going to be using this 18-millimeter lens along with the X9 8K Air camera, but it’ll be cool in the future to get some more lenses to really play with the different fields of view.

Alright, so that does it for the unboxing portion of this video of the Inspire 3, and now it’s time for the fun part: getting this drone outside and giving it a spin for the very first time. Okay, so now what do you say? Let’s get outside and give the Inspire 3 our very first flight.

DJI Inspire 3 First Flight and Impressions

Now, I know I said that we would discuss this case a little bit more in the future, but I quickly just wanted to give DJI a huge set of props for designing this case the way that they did. It is so slim and lightweight. I live in an apartment building; this was the first time that I took this drone out, loaded it into my car, and then brought it here to the spot where I always do my first flights. And it was very easy. I mean, I think the barrier to entry with the Inspire 3 is the size, right? The fact that it comes in a case like this, rather than being, say, a Mavic 3 that fits in your backpack.

Okay, so jumping into our first flight here, I figured it’d be cool to quickly go over the setup of this drone, and then finally get it up into the air. Now, while the case being slim makes it really easy for transportation, DJI didn’t skimp on what goes inside. You can fit anything you need for a general Inspire 3 flight: we’ve got the drone itself, the X9 8K Air camera, up to four lenses inside of the other case. Inside of here, you can carry two controllers, two external batteries for those controllers, two of the charging hubs, extra propellers—everything you need for a flight in this one case which makes it really easy.

Now, in terms of setup of the actual drone itself, even though this seems like a very complex system, it’s actually pretty easy. First of all, we want to take the drone out of the case and mount two batteries into the back side. This gives us power and the ability to take it out of the travel mode. So, we’ll press on the power button five times, and then it’ll lift up into its landing stance. From here, we can then take the X9 camera and mount it onto the front. The final thing is just to add the propellers onto the drone, turn the controller on, and then we are all set and ready to take off.

Now, even though this isn’t as easy to get up in the air as, say, a Mavic 3 would be, chances are you’re going to be bringing this onto a larger production where you’re going to be having more time to set up your drone. And you’re not going to be running and gunning with a drone like this. So, considering that, it takes a very short amount of time to get up and running.

All right, so I think that now would be a good time to tell you that this entire video was shot, edited, and uploaded in 8K, from my Sony A1 here to the Inspire 3 with its X9 8K camera. So now would be a good time to flip your quality settings up on YouTube, even though it’s probably going to be compressed like crazy, to see the full quality of the camera here on the Inspire 3.

Now, I will say that even though we are going to be evaluating the entire drone in this first flight—from the drone itself to the camera—I don’t have any ND Filters, and I’m just going to be flying on automatic camera settings. I know that there’s going to be a lot of people wondering why I would do such a thing with a drone that is built for capturing cinema-quality video, but it’s because it’s my first flight. I’m just trying to get used to the drone itself and give you my thoughts. The last thing I want to have to worry about is trying to adjust camera settings and things like that.

So, we’re going to do one continuous flight here with the Inspire 3 for the very first time. We’ll go ahead, enter our camera view, we’ll go ahead and prime our motors. Just like I remember, it sounds just like the Inspire 2. Go ahead and lift the landing gear up. Gosh, it feels so big! I mean, I have been flying my Mavic 3 daily, and the Inspire 2 that I have is unfortunately broken—rest in peace to that drone—but man, this thing is just such a beast!

All right, so we’re in sport mode. Let’s go ahead and rip on down to the bridge as our very first order of business, like we always do with our first flights. Man, this drone just has so much power to it; it picks right up and gets to its top speed. Now, I went through all of my settings and did the due diligence of trying to make changes accordingly, based on settings I think I’d like with this drone. But again, this is very preliminary, this is first-flight type of stuff. So I went through and did very minimal changing of the settings; in fact, there were a lot of settings to change.

I will say though, that as we bomb down right now, the image quality is just perfect. There’s no breakup in the signal whatsoever, and from what I can see through my sunglasses and through the screen, the camera quality looks amazing as well. We, of course, have some traffic here on 76, but there was no problem with the Inspire 3 getting all the way down there on its own with its fast top speed and the range that it has.

All right, so let’s spin on around. We’ll bring the drone back, and as always, right? We do our first flight, our first leg way down to the bridge, and now we’ll do our reveal of Manayunk just behind us here. So we’re flying with the 18-millimeter lens on here.

I kind of wish I had the strap because the RC Plus is a little bit bulky. But look, it kind of has this arm mechanism built in, so you can almost rest it against your body and this is super comfortable. Like this, it’s really awesome.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself, so again, shooting in automatic camera settings. I think we’re capturing video in D-log; the white balance is automatic. This is not how this drone was intended to be used, but again, this is for me just first-flight stuff, trying to get used to the drone itself. And of course, we’ll be doing some more epic videos in the future with this drone.

I mentioned we’ve got the 18-millimeter lens on here, so it is, I’d say, a little bit wider than I’m used to. I’d love to pick up some more lenses in the future for this drone, but right now we’re just rocking with the 18-millimeter for our first flight.

So let’s go ahead and flip ourselves into normal mode, get a little bit lower, pitch the camera up a little bit, and we’ll do our reveal up and over Manayunk. Yeah, this drone feels so smooth, it feels like it’s on rails. I’m starting to get a little bit of optical avoidance beep there. Man, I just feel like I could do whatever I want with this drone, and it would just go anywhere I wanted it to in the smoothest way possible.

And I’m still kind of trying to get used to the RC Plus here. I mean, I’ve done some flying with it on the M30T, but the M30T is a much different drone than the Inspire 3. Like that is a drone built for commercial purposes; this is a drone built for cinema, right? So you’ve got to get into the groove of trying to get that cinematic shot, that nice smooth shot. Okay, that was awesome. It feels nice and smooth.

Next order of business, as always, flip it back into sport mode and rip right over top of our heads to get a feel for the sound of this drone and the power. I remember I zipped right by on my Mini 3 and that was pretty loud, so I can only imagine that this drone will be ripping like crazy. All right, here we come around the corner. There we are standing right here, and here we come. Man, that thing is so powerful, that is insane!

Now, the sun is way high up in the sky right now. I’m filming this at around 2 p.m., so we’re not going to get much dramatic action in terms of our camera here.

Let’s go ahead and do a nice little pullback down the highway here. We’re still in sport mode. We’ve got to do a flight.

All right, so something else I usually do, and I’ll point you guys over there, is fly underneath this bridge during my first flight. But I don’t think I’m going to do it in this flight. I hope you guys understand that I’m not going to fly this Inspire 3 underneath that bridge.

Oh man, so here’s something that I want to try out: the maximum vertical speed. Yes, up and down, right. So if we put this drone out over the water and spin back around towards us, this thing should be able to dive down at a crazy speed. So let’s go ahead and fly full speed ahead, full speed forwards. This might also be a setting I need to change, and I just didn’t come across it, but let’s go. We’ll dive straight down. We are diving down at 22… oh my God! All right, I’ve got to pull up because I’m almost afraid there. Wow!

All right, let’s gain a bunch of height here. We’ll go all the way up to 400 feet, and then we’ll go ahead and dive down again. Let’s dive down over the water this way. All right, so let’s go way high, right. We’ll go just a little bit under 400 feet, we’ll push forwards, and then we’ll dive straight down.

Look at how quick you can get down to the ground with this drone! And I’m going to pull up just in case. I’ve got to get used to how long it takes to counteract that because I’ve almost slammed my Inspire 2 into the ground. That was really fast, and that’s awesome!

How about upwards? So let’s go ahead, we’ll fly straight this way, get the camera centered, and let’s go ahead and try to fly straight up. Nice! I mean, we can still climb at 17 miles an hour. I mean, the reason I love that is because it just makes the drone so much more agile, right? Like no matter what you need to do, if you need to chase after a moving subject, if you need to get somewhere fast, you can do that, right? Like not only do you have a bunch of speed horizontally on the regular plane that you fly on, but also vertically, right? Like up and down. So that makes this drone super nimble and super agile.

I wish we had a train coming or something like that. I know that sometimes there’s a train that comes along this track, and if we were able to chase a train in our very first flight with the Inspire 3, I think that would be life goals.

First impressions and thoughts

So this is, like, right off the top of my head, first thoughts: this feels like everything that the Inspire 2 gave you, but it’s just upgraded across the board. Like super smooth controls, super strong signal strength. I also don’t have to worry about it crashing because of the obstacle avoidance.

Right, I mean, if I go ahead and flip this into the normal mode, now all my obstacle avoidance sensors are on. And if we tried to, say, bring it around and move it towards the tree here—so we’ve got the trees here in the way—and we try to fly up towards them, right? I mean, the drone will not fly any further forwards than this now.

So, the optical avoidance is great to have, but it also creates a bubble around the entire drone now, so you have coverage in every direction. Let’s go ahead and bring it back towards us here. Nice, look at that! Let’s go ahead and fly straight back. Man, the controls are just so smooth on this drone.

All right, so we have about 47% battery remaining. Remember, we have two battery slots here inside of this drone, so dual battery action is great for redundancy.

Let’s see. I want to do an orbit of some kind. So, even though it’s not the most beautiful building, we have this condo right here to the right that we can kind of try and do a nice little orbit of. This is a shot that I really like to do. Let me look straight down—make sure we’re over the water. Yes, we are; we’re all good.

So, the great thing about this drone is like, you can pitch the camera up a pretty decent amount. So, like, if we were to fly down near the trees like such, we could then get a positive gimbal pitch upwards, like so. And then we could come up and over, and there’s no props in the shot whatsoever.

So, this is a nice, beautiful shot. It could be a much more beautiful building, but I will say that I’m definitely noticing a difference with this 18-millimeter lens. It’s way wider than anything I’ve shot with on a drone. I didn’t think it’d make that much of a difference. I think the widest I’ve shot with is an Air 2S that has a 20-millimeter focal length equivalent, and yeah, this just feels way wider. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, but it’s just nice to know that there are other lenses available for this drone if you wanted to get a different look. Like putting a 50-millimeter on this 8K ProRes will all… come on!

Oh man, speaking of ProRes. So right now, we’re capturing video in ProRes 422 HQ, and look, in the top right corner—look at how fast we are eating up storage. We’re at 686, now we have 685 left, now we have 684 left. We started with like 940 gigs on this SSD, and we’ve already chewed through a good amount. So, you’re definitely going to want to make sure that you can offload this SSD frequently.

Here’s another shot that we can do: we’ll flip it back into the normal mode. I’ve got to adjust my manual or my customization buttons too, so that I can quickly adjust the camera up and down. I tried to dig through as many settings as I could, but with the Inspire 3, man, you have so many settings to go through.

All right, we’ll start way down here, underneath the bridge, and then we’ll come up and over like so, revealing the beautiful 76 traffic. Look at that. Wouldn’t you just want to be sitting in that with your car? Maybe one of these times if you’re passing by on 76, I’ll be here flying my drone and you’ll be able to wave and say hi. Man, that looks beautiful. I can’t wait to get this onto my computer and start color grading it. Again, I think I’m shooting in D-log. We do have an automatic white balance as well.

I’d love to be able to do some skyline shots from here, like some reveal shots. With the Mavic 3 Pro, it’s great with the new 70-millimeter lens to be able to get these reveal shots, but 18 millimeters is just a little bit too wide.

All right, let’s spin around and bring it back. Here’s something that I’ve noticed right off the bat as well, and I had a lot of issues with my Inspire 2 and the cameras used on that drone: the horizon would kind of get wonky if you moved the drone back and forth. Now, this is brand new, and of course, sometimes these problems can develop over time, but just to give you an example, like, if I move left, right, left, right, look at how level the horizon stays.

You can see the FPV camera’s going crazy because the drone is going back and forth, but that camera is stable, which is awesome. I mean, that was one of the biggest complaints I had with my Inspire 2: I was constantly trying to correct the gimbal or the horizon line in post, or I was constantly trying to manually correct it within the actual drone itself, but this is super solid.

Oh, we’re not even in sport mode, guys! You know the rule on this channel: always in sport mode, at least most of the time.

All right, let’s bring her home. We’ve got 26% remaining. We’ll dive on down here back to the parking garage, bring it down lower, lower the landing gear, and land the drone for our very first flight of the Inspire 3. This thing just has so much power.

How’s the braking? Let’s go full speed and try to stop. Man, that thing throws on the brakes quick. I don’t know if you heard that—you might have heard it—but it’s doing the brakes quick.

All right, flip back into normal mode, bring it on down here. Yeah, look at that, man. What a beast of a drone. All right, we’ll lower the landing gear, bring the drone on down.

Oh man, all right, so after the first flight of the Inspire 3, I’m blown away. I haven’t been flying my Inspire 2 in a while because it’s broken, so getting a chance to finally fly an Inspire drone again is awesome, especially considering it is their newest version of it.

Definitely make sure you stay tuned here on the channel because I’ve got plenty of content on the Inspire 3 in store for you guys, from how to use it, and also some fun videos just taking this thing out to anywhere that I can and capturing some epic, beautiful photos, video, and just some great scenery.

Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know your thoughts on this drone down in the comment section below and, as always, I’ll talk to you later. Peace.