Drone thoughts/recommendations?

[sam3d]

Does anyone have any general thoughts/recommendations/tips regarding the current consumer level drones on the market in relation to Zephyr? I'm beginning to look in to training but in the meantime it'd be great to get some insight from experienced users and understand what matters for successful photogrammetry.

I know it's very subjective and more $ = better but for example is it worth investing in the 1" sensor of the Mavic Pro 2? Would a Spark be poor value for money? Good/bad brands?

Currently i'm using a full frame slr for ground based work but ideally I want to produce detailed models of buildings & land up to approx. 200mx200m.

Any info would be appreciated

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi sam,

while i personally have not flown a Mavic, we have a Spark here and for the money it has a really good quality.

This was shot with our Spark for example (ground pictures with DSLR + spark)

https://sketchfab.com/models/3f446e5b621a4817b60cf619077142cc

I have personally seen a couple of mavic dataset and i wasn't particularly impressed compared to spark datasets, but that may have also been due to the acquisiton conditions. Given the price i would go for a spark but again, please don't take this as an absolute but rather my personal experience

[sam3d]

Perfect thanks Andrea that's very helpful and appreciated. Based on that the Spark looks like excellent value

I wondered about a Karma drone as i have a gopro but in my experience the images often don't orientate well even using Deep settings.

I have experimented with small batches of images from both a Mavic Air & Pro, which I found worked well and they seem to get a lot of praise.

Hmmm...?

[Andrea Alessi]

If the subject is pretty hard my experience is that it helps to run a specific calibration for the GoPro (and eventually drive the reconstruction with control points). If i had to choose i would absolutely get something like a spark or mavic rather than a gopro