Fixing the DJI Mavic 4 Pro’s Biggest Flaw

The DJI Mavic 4 Pro has a problem. Fortunately, I found a solution. But first, check out these two frames here. What do you notice that’s different about these two frames? What if I showed you these two frames? What do you notice that’s different about these two frames here? What’s the difference between those two frames? It’s the field of view. The biggest problem I’ve encountered with the Mavic 4 so far is the fact that it’s 28 mm on the main camera, which means you have a little bit narrower field of view than pretty much every DJI drone up to this point. And while 28 mm is great, and I think part of the reason they did that was so that the drone could tilt up to 70°, which is insane, but still have a perfectly clear field of view and not get any props or anything like that in the camera shot. But sometimes when you’re in locations where you can’t back up any farther, you need a wider field of view or you might not be able to go any higher and you need a wider field of view.

The Solution: Wide-Angle Lens

Fortunately, there is a solution and it’s this wide-angle lens here. Now, this is the only wide-angle lens I’ve been able to find for the Mavic. So, I went out to test it and see exactly how it performs. And yes, unsurprisingly, it gives you a wider field of view. Now, there are a couple of caveats to that and a couple of things you need to know about that, but it takes it from a 28 mm field of view to about somewhere between 15 and 18 millimeter field of view as near as I can tell, which is great.

To have that extra width is really nice and gives you a much wider field of view as you can see in all of these shots here. And in the case of this waterfall here, like I could not back up any farther. This is a very densely forested and very steep rocky area. So, I couldn’t get back any farther. But another reason that I like wider fields of view is the feeling of going by stuff. When you have a wider field of view and you’re going by stuff that’s nearby, it gives you that feeling of speed and the feeling that the drone is actually moving really fast because you see that kind of distortion stretching on the edges of the frame and it just pushes things around and makes it feel a little bit faster.

Testing the Lens

But one of the biggest questions I had about this, because it’s not an expensive wide-angle lens, and I hope that other wide-angle lens options come to market, but for now, this is the only one. Uh, and it is linked in the description with affiliate links. My biggest question about this was how badly did it distort the image or degrade the image. And here you can see with a lot of straight lines, which is true with any wide-angle lens that I’ve ever used on any DJI drone, whether it was DJI’s official wide-angle lens or Freewell’s wide-angle lens, it didn’t matter. It does bow the edges of the frame a little bit.

However, I was shocked to see how little it bowed the straight lines of the bridge. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I’ve noticed much worse bowing on some of the official DJI wide-angle lenses. The next thing I wanted to test is how far up can you look to see if essentially you can still get the full 70° up tilt or if you’re limited to a little bit less. And in most conditions, you are still able to tilt upwards the full 70°. I never saw any props in the shot or anything like that. The one issue that could come into play is that if you’re in heavy winds and your drone is tipped forward too far, it might not be able to go all the way up to 70° because this does touch the very top of the drone. But other than that, I saw no differences between with this lens on or with this lens off in how far up you could tilt. And it is kind of cool cuz you can get some pretty sweet effects with this thing.

Caveats and Issues

But then we come to a couple of the caveats or the issues with this lens. The first is you can’t power the drone on with this lens on because of the way the new gimbal is designed and its full massive range of motion. The lens, because it protrudes—it sticks out so far—will stop the gimbal from going through its whole like self-check calibration issue and it’ll throw you an error code. You’ll have to take the lens off and restart the drone. So, you can only put this lens on once the drone is powered on. Okay, that’s not that big a deal. Like, who cares? It’s really not that big a deal.

The second issue is that there’s no way to attach ND filters to this because of the weight and because of the way it’s designed. Uh, I don’t know, maybe the gimbal could take the weight if you had little clip-on filters on the front, but at least for now, this is fairly heavy and you can’t—there’s no option for attachable ND filters. Now, a solution for that could be to get some ND filter film and put it here, like maybe a one or two stop ND filter film and put it here. But because the Mavic 4 has the adjustable aperture on the main camera, it does give you some flexibility and ability, you know, the ability like I shot all this stuff without ND filters and I was able to keep the shutter speed at two times my frame rate in the right range to be able to get this footage. But um it does limit you in how bright conditions you can use this in if you want to maintain your proper shutter speed compared to your frame rate.

On the official DJI clear filter, you can see that there’s glass on all of the lenses. So it protects all three cameras from getting any like dust or moisture in. I mean you probably shouldn’t be flying in the rain anyway, but any sort of things getting into the camera. Whereas this only has glass on this main part and there’s nothing here to protect the other two cameras. Now on the other two cameras, there still is a lens, but I’m not going to say that that is uh I wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that that is 100% sealed. And so if you got moisture or dust in there, like the potential that it could get into your camera is a little bit higher. The only other issue I’ve run into is that this can be a little harder to get on and off. It’s, you know, maybe just not quite as machined or refined as the other filters from Freewell or DJI. And so it does tend to stick a little bit when I go to take it off, but other than that, it clicks on fine. It just when I go to take it off, it takes a little bit of just kind of twitching to get it to come off.

Conclusion

And that’s going to do it for me. You’re going to want to see this video here next, which goes over some accessories for the DJI Mavic 4 Pro. I will see you again soon in the next video. In the meantime, if you have questions, ask me in the comments below or join my live stream, which happens most Wednesday nights at 4:00 p.m. Alaska time, 8:00 p.m. Eastern, where we can have more conversation and I can answer questions that I probably didn’t get to in this video. I’ll see you again soon in the next one. Cheers.