DJI Inspire 3 - My Initial Thoughts & Impressions

In case you missed it, DJI finally unveiled their newest, top of the line, cinema drone in the Inspire 3. This improves upon the Inspire 2 in so many ways, bringing it up to the “industry standard” as I like to call it. My full impressions can be found in the video that I posted over to my YouTube channel, but I want to quickly highlight some of the standout features of this beast.

Airframe Improvements

So to start things off, with the improvements made to the airframe, I think that this is one of the reasons the inspire is such a standout drone is because it looks badass, right? It's great that it has awesome specs under the hood, it carries an awesome camera, it has great image quality, but I mean, really, the drone looks mean, it looks aggressive, and that definitely gives it points for style.

Now with this new Inspire 3, DJI has kind of taken it to the next level and made it look even cooler. It almost has this forward stance when the drone is sitting on the ground and then as it takes off, it lifts up and back. Now, aside from looking cool, DJI also says that this new design improves the efficiency as well as the speed of the drone, both horizontally and vertically. But overall, just looking at some of the photos and videos that DJ has released, really just look at how much of a marvel of engineering the Inspire 3 is because it looks so awesome.

Now moving into some of the features that have been integrated into the airframe of the Inspire 3, the first thing I wanna touch on is the new FPV camera. This is a camera that's mounted to the front of the drone that is always looking forward, and you can find one of these FPV cameras installed in basically any DJI drone that allows dual operator support. So drones like the Inspire 2, the Matrice 30, and the Matrice 300, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Basically, if you've got a drone where two people can fly; one flies the drone while the other person controls the camera, that FPV camera is really important so that the person flying the drone can always see what's ahead of the drone. So this FPV camera in the Inspire 3 gives you a wider field of view, better dynamic range, and overall better visibility and low light, which is definitely a warm welcome as the Inspire 2 FPV camera, I'm gonna say, is close to useless.

Now continuing on with the theme of features that we've seen in other enterprise and commercial drones from DJI, we also have a dual battery system in the Inspire 3 that was available on the Inspire 2, but with this drone, we now have an upgraded version of that battery in the TB51. So this now allows us to fly for longer and gives us a higher level of redundancy. So if one battery fails, you've got a second battery that's independent of the other so that you can come down and land safely. There's also a brand new charging hub, the TB51 Intelligent Battery Charging Bub that can hold up to eight batteries at once, which is much better than the four batteries that could go on the Inspire 2’s charging hub.

Now, perhaps the biggest upgrade made to the Inspire 3’s airframe is the omnidirectional obstacle avoidance. So we now have cameras looking in every direction around the drone that basically create a bubble and help you avoid obstacles. The Inspire 3’ uses the new wide angle cameras as found on the Mavic 3 line of drones, so these have a wider field of view, they're a higher resolution, they're overall a better obstacle avoidance sensor than what was found on the nearly six and a half year old Inspire 2. So we've now got more sensors, which makes it, I would say, easier to fly because you don't have to worry about crashing your drone.

Two very important specs to touch on are top speed and flight time. The Inspire 3 is able to reach ascent speeds of 17 mph (8 m/s), decent speeds of 22 mph (10 m/s), and horizontal speeds of 58 mph (94 kph). The maximum flight time is an advertised 28 minutes using those two TB51 batteries. These are the two areas that I am a little disappointed in as I expected a faster, longer flying drone.

Camera Improvements

The new Zenmuse X9 Air is a straight beast, and DJI has the examples to prove it. Their launch video was littered with incredible footage captured all around the world from this full frame sensor, but I want to refrain from getting into specifics until I get a chance to actually use the camera for myself to capture some footage. DJI has some great resources available like a full spec sheet and they even have some sample footage that you can download and mess around with for yourself.

This camera unfortunately will not be compatible with DJI’s Ronin 4D. It is the same camera system, however, the Inspire 3 uses the “Air” version of the X9 8K camera. This means that you will need two completely separate cameras for both systems if you plan on using them together.

Feature Improvements

While improvements to the airframe and camera are always important, I think that the features introduced make this drone as powerful as it is. O3 Pro for example is a multigenerational leap in transmission system technology from what came with the Inspire 2 - Lightbridge 2. Other features like Dual-Antenna Orientation, RTK Positioning, Waypoints Pro, Repeatable Routes, 3D Dolly, and Spotlight Pro are going to make the usage of this drone for capturing aerial video that much easier. If you want to see these features in action, I would highly recommend checking out DJI’s launch video, or the overview video that I uploaded to my channel.

Final Thoughts

So what do you think of the Inspire 3? Is it the upgrade that you were expecting? This is surely not a drone for everyone, but for those that can take advantage of what this beast can offer will be very happy with what DJI has provided.