DJI Matrice 4T: First Look and Flight Test

All right, so today I’m up in Ottawa, Canada for one reason, and that’s to check out DJI’s newest Enterprise drone, the Matrice 4T. Notice we have something sitting up on top of the drone here – this is AVSS’s prototype parachute. As you know, they’ve been a great partner to the channel over the years. We’ve done some great things like crashing drones and showcasing their technology, allowing flight over people without the need for a waiver. So when they reached out and asked if I wanted to come and take a look at a parachute they were developing for a brand new DJI drone, of course I said yes.

First look at the DJI Matrice 4T

We’re going to take our first look and first flight with the Matrice 4T, but man, it is cold out here, so I’m going to do it from my car. Remember, this is going to be our first look at this drone. I’m not aware of all the nuances, specs, and features. I was just told, “Hey, here’s a new drone, go fly it,” and here we are.

Let’s hover it here. As you guys saw, there was an insane-looking camera array on the front, so I want to just get a feel for what we have here. We have this wide-angle camera up at the top – it shows a 1.7 aperture, so it will let in a good amount of light and probably be good in low-light scenarios. I’m going to turn down the sound so it’s not crazy loud. It looks like we also have a zoom and an IR camera as well.

Let’s look over here – we’ll try to zoom in. We’ll press the zoom button, and now we have a nice 7x zoom. Let’s continue to push in – the zoom is very nice. 18x… how far can we go? 48x! This is some pretty good zoom here – 112x. So 112x zoom on that zoom camera. Of course, some of this seems to be digital zoom – there’s going to be a little bit of optical and a little bit of digital zoom, but I will tell you that was a good amount of zoom right there. You just notice it switched back over to the wide camera to bring us to 1x.

Now how about the IR? There’s the IR – it is nice and crisp. Let’s look down at the car. We’re going to see a little bit of heat from the vehicle, which will be right… oh, it’s right underneath us right there! The IR camera definitely is nice. Looks like we have some zoom here as well – we can zoom in with the infrared a pretty good amount. Man, that zooms in a lot further than some of the other drones! The focal length of the thermal camera definitely is a little bit tighter than some of the other drones, which is good. I think for what people are going to be using this drone for – inspections and search and rescue – a little bit of a tighter focal length for the thermal camera is good.

Let’s switch back over to the wide camera. Let’s talk about this controller for a second. This is kind of like a trimmed-down version of the DJI RC Plus. Again, I don’t know the exact specs on this controller, but it definitely resembles it from the design as well as some of the ports. I would say it’s just a little bit lighter. Let’s go and open up the back – you can still put in an extra battery in the back there if you want, that backup battery. You have some of the different ports we’re used to: USB-A and HDMI at the top, and at the bottom, we’ve got Micro SD and USB-C.

Test Flight of the DJI Matrice 4T

Okay, so let’s fly over to this construction site. The good thing about being out here is there’s absolutely nobody around. This parachute is still a prototype as well, so it’s not rated for flight over people yet. This here is a spot that we were actually filming at with this drone just above this construction site – this is a pretty cool-looking building. Let’s say if we wanted to look at some of the intricate details down here in the work area where all the trailers are. We’ll switch over to the zoom, we’ll punch in on the right side here. Nice! You can definitely see a good amount of detail here – this is 14x, this is 28x. So there’s a good amount of zoom here. Looks like the zoom camera also has an f/2.8 aperture up there in the top right.

Now look here on the left – we have the rangefinder, we have routes which is probably waypoints, we have AI smart track, and then probably cruise control here. Let’s jump back to the wide camera, we’ll zoom around, we’ll spin over here to the left. Let’s just press on AI and see what that does.

AI Features on the DJI Matrice 4T

Oh, look at that! It shows the amount of people, cars, and boats in a frame. Now it’s not perfect because this is a fairly wide angle, but it actually gives us a total count – that’s actually very impressive! Look, there actually are two people down there, that is crazy! So it looks at those two little figures down there and shows it as two people. That is so cool! Let’s punch in – let’s actually switch over to the zoom camera. Yeah, so it gives us a much better view. There it shows two cars and three people. I wonder where it thinks the third person is… four people now! That is a fairly cool feature. I’m not going to say that this is in its final form because I’m flying the drone before it even comes out. Wait – is it… I think it’s actually picking up the baby as a person! That is crazy! The AI feature looks really cool.

Let’s jump back to the wide camera. This does have what seems to be a rangefinder, which is cool. It has a laser rangefinder just like the H20 cameras would, or the H30 camera from DJI’s M300 series, the Matrice series. That’s pretty cool – we have a laser rangefinder, smart track is also awesome.

Let’s see, do we have a car driving anywhere? Smart track will be able to actually track onto a car and then move along with it – that’s a feature that’s also come over from other DJI drones. Let’s try to zoom in and see if we can do smart track on one of these vehicles way far out here. Look at this, it’s actually snowing just a little bit! So smart track, it’ll give us options to select – look at all the cars! Oh, that is… wait, there actually were a ton of cars over there. Wow, the AI feature actually got it right!

Let’s tap on that van. So tap on the van, it’s going to zoom in… oh, it just missed focus a little bit – there it goes. So the focusing seems to be a little bit of an issue, but there it goes – it’s picking up that subject, and I’ll tell you, it is very defined. Like, it has it wrapped right around that van. You can tell that SmartTrack has definitely been updated from previous drones. We actually have a car coming right underneath us right now. Let’s use smart track on that. We’ll press smart track, we will tap on… let’s see… the vehicle there. Cool! And look at that – it zooms right in and it’s going to follow him.

So I am not touching the controls at all – the drone is actually spinning around and zooming in to keep him in the middle of the frame. This is not a new feature, it’s been in DJI’s other drones, but you can tell that it’s definitely been refined and the AI is very powerful. That’s awesome!

Okay, let’s jump out of the SmartTrack feature, we’ll go back from AI. Let’s see, let’s just get a feel for the actual speed of the drone now. We’ll go and hit wide. The flight time seems to be pretty good – we’ve got 55%. I think we took off with about 80%. Let’s see… it doesn’t show us our remaining flight time estimated, but I will say the flight time is pretty good from what I’ve seen so far.

All right, let’s go ahead and flip into sport mode – how fast can we get this drone up? 40 miles an hour… I would say it’s probably going to max out at like 45… 43, that’s pretty good! I wonder if there are some settings here. We’ll go into the settings, we’ll go to the… let’s see… parameters. Where would they be under? I know that you can choose like the gain and expo settings on the… on the… yeah, where are… let’s see… in sport mode – oh, we don’t even have the maximum speed turned up! So 33 m/s is the maximum speed in sport mode.

Let’s spin back around, give ourselves a little bit of room here. There is nobody down there, which is good. We’ll go ahead – there is a vehicle, so let’s actually go this way. We’ll push the drone over this empty parking lot. All right, let’s see it – sport mode! Let’s see how fast we can get this thing going. That thing is moving! 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46… cool! So about 46 miles an hour. Nice!

Awesome! Well hey, I have to say that for me just jumping into this drone, it definitely feels like a nice refined experience. The drone is fairly small itself – it’s a really nice combination of a small form factor and a powerful drone. This seems to be kind of like in between the M30 and the Mavic 3. So I wonder – like, are they going to do away with the Mavic 3 and M30 and just combine the drones and give us this one drone? I guess it kind of seems the way that we’re going here.

All right, so that wraps up our first look at the Matrice 4T here. Listen to that – it has such a low pitch, such a low hum. It’s definitely fairly quiet, quieter than DJI’s other drones, which is definitely a nice touch. So in my opinion, this seems to be a really good replacement for the Mavic 3 as well as the Matrice 30, but again, this was such a preliminary first look. I almost feel like this shouldn’t have even been a video, as I’m going to get my hands on this drone in the future and make much more in-depth content, but I figured if I had the opportunity to get an early look, I’d love to be able to show you guys what’s on the forefront of Enterprise drone technology from DJI, and this seems to be like a really good option.

Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know your thoughts on the Matrice 4T down below, and as always, I’ll talk to you later.

Peace!

Last update on 2026-01-28 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API