DJI is having a bumper year with a heavy demand for its drones, which is boosted by the high usage of drones of whatever shape and size in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. For its latest offering, the company unveiled the Mavic 3 Classic which is can be purchased as lower price than the original Mavic 3.

Whilst the Mavic 3 Classic has many of the features of the original, the caveat is that the telephoto lens seen in the Mavic 3 is dropped to make it affordable. To compensate for this missing feature, it still has the 4/3 CMOS 20-megapixel Hasselblad camera as DJI owns a majority share of the iconic Swedish camera company. If you look at other Mavic 3 models which also includes the Cine version, it is hard to distinguish one from the other apart from the lens.

The Mavic 3 Classic also has the O3 Plus transmission system which can transmit up to a distance of 15kms and 1080p/60fps live feed. It has a 46 minutes maximum flight time and 40 minutes hover time. It has Omnidirectional Obstacle Sensing with APAS 5.0 allowing it avoid obstacles and collisions.

With the advanced RTH, the Mavic 3 Classic can automatically determine the optimal route back to its home point and execute it quickly and the Cruise control, the drone can fly in any direction without the operator keeping on pressing the controls, allowing for smoother camera capture of the scenery or the airsoft gameplay below.

For image and video capture, camera can capture 5.1K footage at 50fps and 4K/1080p at 60fps with slow motion mode boosting 4K to 120fps and 1080p to 200fps. Stills are at 12-bit RAW and video is recorded in 10-bit D-Log. The ability to capture in RAW and 10-bit D-log will allow more flexibility whilst editing in post.

The DJI Mavic 3 Classic is available to order from US$1,469 which is cheaper by US$450 compared to the original Mavic 3.  If you want to get one with a controller, the price creeps up to US$1,599 with the DJI RC-N1 controller, or US$1,749 with the DJI RC controller.