TOP CAMERA-DRONE shoot-out

OOoooo KAY
Guys its been raining VERY competent camera-drones lately.
So many in fact thats its hard to pick a winner.    here is my first attempt of quantifying the current top tier camera drone CAMERA's     you are going to want to look at the images in full-rez

HUGE THANK YOU.. to Frank @ CarolinaDronz.com for helping making this happen. WEBSITE

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel as Im working on the video comparison of the same units.   FPVguy YouTube

To study images in detail, click on them, click browser back to return to blog-post. 

Before we get carried away, let me hurry and clarify some of the core information here.  the Yuneec H and the AUTEL xStar captured 4:3 images the rest 16:9 images
For convenience I have trimmed not scaled the images here seen as the largest 4:3 common area, I DID scale the X5 image as it was shot with 12mm which is slightly longer so that the features matched the size of the other cameras.
the inspire X3 image unfortunately was accidentally under exposed and is not representative but left in place for general reference, for what its worth, the inspire x3 sensor pulled a lot more data out of the shadows than I had expected when I lightened it to match the others.
 

First quick look reveals a couple things,  the Autel have cool colors where the Yuneec is warm, too warm for my taste but easy to adjust, the P4 strike a nice medium on colors the P3p is cooler and clearly not as good a camera as the P4.
I picked a angle with a lot of objects and small but bright sky to challenge the dynamic range.. it worked.

for comparison I picked a shadow area close to a highlight,  a medium sky area and finally a deep shadow without close highlights to avoid flare.. this give you a fairly good idea of lens flare control.

The biggest surprise here for me was.. well actually there are two surprises.. 
*unsurprisingly the DJI P4 which is the worlds leading drone series and DJI's current flagship PROsumer drone, is good, VERY good. with a very competent camera,
1.  The AUTEL, holysnot.. its got light in the shadows AND are holding sky details..
     easily BEST Dynamic range
2.  Surprisingly the Yuneec H is holding onto the sky with a 253 value (barely) 
     clearly a great sensor, but unfortunately the lens let down the sensor by flare and softness.

Here is the numbers as measured, I did give all the cameras the benefit of the doubt and hunted for the darker pixel in the general shadow areas (circle) so the shadow numbers is the best number found in that area.. the high number on the bush shadow for the Yuneec is caused by bright light from the highlight flaring and polluting the shadow area. 

Here is a 100% view to get a idea how these hold up for fine details and again also showing how bright light spreads. 



Again you gotta click on this to see the details.
Bottom line here is these are good, the P3 from last year clearly burn the most but then we expected that.  to be honest I did not expect the new Yuneec H to be quite that good on the sensor,   The P4 and the H are pretty much neck in neck with the P4 having a sharper lens.   I'm shocked that the $900 xStar matching the P4 details and beating the P4's dynamic range..   

NOW hold the presses for a moment.. this test is done on the raw camera JPEG's   this is how probably 98% of all users will use their flying camcorders.   however some of us are DNG users.  I did not get DNG's from all of these and not enough for a in-dept test. however.. I want to make sure everybody realize, that if you crack open the P4 DNG. the data is there.  DJI would probably make a lot of people  (me included since Im a inspire pilot) happy by applying more of a S curve and less lift in the highlight to their JPG processing.

The first round above make it very clear, the P4 and the xStar is who we are looking at for the top camera.   the H and P3 are both good but.. 

here is a quick side-by side from Photoshop, -1.0 on the exposure and +30 in shadow details to flatten things so we can see that... YES in fact, there are tons of sky details in the P4 file as well as the xStar file.  with the same treatment the xStar still seems to have more density in the sky, but both DNG files are solid.

going a little closer 

who is kidding who.. these are both OUTSTANDING cameras.. like really good.

One last DNG comparison..  

Here we are looking at two things, fist the shadow details in general and second the sharpness-softness of the rendering of the fine details..  again these are raw files and could reflect sharpening in camera and post sharpening may make one look closer to the other etc..   I'm just going to leave these up here for your guys to browse.

Don't get me wrong here.  again.. Im a inspire pilot,  these images was shot not to prove anything, but simply because I wanted to see how close all of these top drones really are.   Truth is that ANYONE of these drones are outstanding products, they all have way above average flight systems and way above average camera systems.

Again, i could not have done this without the help from my friend Frank @ CarolinaDronz.com and several of my photographer friends who helped review the images   Franks WEBSITE

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel as Im working on the video comparison of the same units.   FPVguy YouTube

  

GUYS>>>>>  DISCUSS.. comment..
Im going to redo this test for sure.. what do I need to improve, do differently. TALK TO ME.!

Comments

[Bo Lorentzen]

Hey Luke,
YES correct with the lens upgrade the H is equally sharp as the xStar.
it is lacking a bit in JPEG headroom, however in the DNG you find about the same amount of information. so yes a lens upgraded H shooting DNG's will play nice with a xStar and probably beat the P4
Here is a side-by-side of the video from the upgraded lens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cloKjJJf-o4

[luke]

Hi Bo, thanks for sharing this comparison. I would be really interested to see the results of the H with the updated lens in this comparison. It seems like the sensor is as good as the other but the image was soft. With the new lens I wonder if the image is on par with the P4 and X-star.

[Bo Lorentzen]

Thank you Scott, Im really surprised with the xStar, for the price it far outperforms what I had expected for $900

[Scott Manthey]

This was very helpful. I have the 3DR Solo (two of them) and while I love the platform, I truly dislike the GoPro and it's very limited DR. Looks like the Xstar is in my future.

[Bo Lorentzen]

Hey Ayams,
I would say you can probably sharpen the file using that process. I think the sensor and the lens is improved over the previous camera, but guessing the communications are the same.

Bo

[Ayams Manuk]

Hi Bo. I heard something about the camera sharpness command on the C-GO3 but can't confirm that feature is available on the Typhoon H camera, hopefully you can see if the sharpness issue that you mentions can be solved by this sharpness command. For you info here is the link that I found about the sharpness command.

http://yuneec-forum.com/threads/set-image-sharpness-by-command.2944/

[Steve AKA "RC Tanks & Trucks 24/7"]

Excellent stuff here Bo!

I was waiting for something like this to be honest. I am in the market for a drone primarily for real estate videos/photos. The Typhoon H was on the top of my list but after seeing this the P4 still looks the top dog.

Can't wait to see more comparisons. Awesome stuff :)
Many thanks from Sydney

[Robert Gunter]

Thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to creating some great video and stills with my new X Star Premium!