The Best Drones for Photos and Video

The DJI Air 3 is easy to fly, has an ample 46-minute battery life, and is equipped with two cameras, giving you options for more varied and interesting shots than its predecessor. We recommend buying the Air 3 as part of DJI’s Fly More combo because it’s the only package that also includes the DJI RC 2 controller, which features a built-in screen and is a marked improvement over the standard controller’s reliance on your phone’s screen for live view.

The Air 3 can sense and avoid obstacles approaching from all directions, as it adds side sensing, which our previous pick lacked. These new sensing abilities make the ActiveTrack feature, which directs the drone to autonomously follow and film a subject while also avoiding obstacles, easier to use in more situations.

It can hold its position steadily, even in moderate winds, so you can focus on your cinematography. And it can go with you almost anywhere: Measuring 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches folded and weighing roughly 1.5 pounds, the Air 3 fits well in most standard-size backpacks.
Upgrade pick
DJI Mavic 3 Pro
A drone with all the bells and whistles

If you want the best cameras in a drone, get this model. Its main camera has a larger sensor than that of our top pick, and it adds 70mm- and 166mm-equivalent lenses to capture more-distant subjects.
$2,999 from Amazon
(Fly More Combo)
$2,999 from Walmart
$3,000 from Best Buy
(Fly More Combo)

The DJI Mavic 3 Pro takes many of the best features of the Air 3 and, for a little more than twice the price, ups the camera count to three. Not only does it offer a Hasselblad-branded 24mm-equivalent wide-angle lens with a Four Thirds sensor, but it also sports two telephoto lenses: a 70mm-equivalent with a 1/1.3-inch sensor and a 166mm-equivalent with a 1/2-inch sensor.

Thanks to the comparatively huge sensor on the main camera, the Mavic 3 Pro can capture more detail than our other picks and can do so in a much wider band of lighting conditions. As a result, it produces better images right out of the camera but also gives editing software more data to work with to improve the images even further.

This model can capture vibrant, detailed still images with its three cameras, and its video—at up to 5.1K resolution—looks more color-accurate than footage from the competition. It also has a 43-minute battery life, which isn’t the longest we’ve ever seen in our tests (our top pick beats it by a bit) but comes pretty close.
Budget pick
DJI Mini 3
An impressive entry-level drone

This drone offers DJI’s autonomous features (minus obstacle avoidance) and a 4K camera that can shoot in portrait or landscape, and it fits all of that into a tiny package weighing less than 250 grams.
$419 from Amazon
$420 from Best Buy

If you’re just getting into drone photography, especially for personal use, the DJI Mini 3 is a fantastic starter package. Though it costs less than half as much as our top pick, it still offers a 4K camera, a long (38-minute) battery life, and a compact, lightweight build that just slides under the FAA’s 250-gram limit.

The Mini 3’s camera and sensor aren’t as high-quality as those of the Air 3, but the f/1.7 aperture provides surprisingly good image quality in lower-light conditions.

This model also comes with all the important features you need from a video drone, such as image and flight stabilization, an included controller, and smart flight modes, in which the drone flies itself to easily capture cinematic shots. But it lacks the obstacle-avoidance sensors of more expensive models.

You have the option to extend the battery life to 51 minutes via DJI’s Intelligent Flight Battery Plus, but using that add-on makes the drone heavy enough that you have to register it with the FAA.
Also great
DJI Avata 2
A thrilling, ready-to-fly FPV drone

Like other first-person-view (FPV) models, this drone trades obstacle avoidance and stability for more aggressive, immersive footage. But its software and hardware guardrails make it more beginner-friendly than most.
$1,199 from Amazon
(Fly More Combo)
$1,200 from Best Buy
(Fly More Combo)

All of our picks are capable of capturing good-looking, high-resolution aerial footage. But while the others focus on smooth cinematic shots of landscapes or sweeping vistas, the DJI Avata 2 is designed to emphasize speed and agility, creating footage that makes you feel as if you’re riding onboard.

This small, buzzy fighter jet—DJI’s third iteration of its first-person-view drone—finally puts the FPV format inside an easily accessible and relatively practical package. It’s equipped with a 1/1.3-inch sensor that shoots 4K footage at up to 100 frames per second, motors that can propel it at up to 27 meters per second (in contrast to the Air 3 and Mavic 3 Pro’s 21 meters per second), and a sturdy plastic shell that can handle a wide range of impacts when you inevitably run it into a tree or wall.

The Fly More Combo that we recommend includes an updated headset, three batteries good for roughly 20 minutes of flight time each, and a new, smaller version of the motion controller that launched with the original DJI FPV drone. This upgraded controller makes flying more intuitive for new pilots, but if you want to unlock the more aggressive manual control mode, you should also have DJI’s more traditional FPV Remote Controller 3.
Also great
Autel Robotics Evo Lite+
An alternative to DJI

This easy-to-fly drone provides a 6K camera and 40 minutes of flight time, and unlike DJI drones, it has no known security concerns. But the video quality isn’t as crisp or colorful.
$1,149 from Amazon
$899 from Walmart

May be out of stock

If you are avoiding the DJI brand due to security or human-rights concerns, or if you want a 6K camera, we recommend the Autel Robotics Evo Lite+.

This drone can fly for up to 40 minutes with autonomous options similar to those of DJI drones. And unlike the DJI Fly app, the Autel Sky app is available for direct download from the Google Play store.

However, we still prefer DJI drones for their value and image quality.
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Read more from Electronics
The research

Why you should trust us
Who this is for
How we picked and tested
Our pick: DJI Air 3
Upgrade pick: DJI Mavic 3 Pro
Budget pick: DJI Mini 3
Also great: DJI Avata 2
Also great: Autel Robotics Evo Lite+
Other good drones
Some notes on DJI drone security and privacy
What to look forward to
The competition

Looking for something else?

Read more from Electronics
Why you should trust us

I’m a staff writer covering games and hobbies for Wirecutter, and I’ve been covering drones since 2022. I have my FAA part 107 license, and I’ve flown a dozen different drones for testing purposes (and crashed only a few times).

For this guide:

I personally flew 12 different drones in various locations from model-airplane fields in New York City to the national forests of Colorado.
I pored through drone forums, read scores of reviews, and talked with drone pilots to gauge what pilots are looking for in this category.
In accordance with Wirecutter’s standards and to avoid any conflict of interest, I don’t own stock or have any other financial interest in a company or industry that I cover or am likely to cover.
Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

Who this is for

Drones (or, more specifically, quadcopters) are small aircraft that come equipped with a camera to shoot bird’s-eye-view photos and videos. They can reach spaces that other cameras are unable to go without a crane or helicopter, making this sort of photography and videography more accessible for the average person.

But the drones we cover in this guide might be of interest to certain professionals, too. They can be great additions to a pro kit for everything from filming a wedding to inspecting gutters to capturing footage of a house for sale.

Those who work in the film industry should consider higher-end models that allow them to mount specific camera equipment on the drone. The same goes for people who want to inspect farmland and industrial equipment, since that task can call for specialized sensors.
How we picked and tested
Four drones hovering near each other in a snowy yard.
Photo: James Austin

After reading both professional reviews and owner reviews, and speaking to drone enthusiasts, experts, and manufacturers at the CES trade show, we considered the following criteria while looking for drones to test:

Quadcopter design: Drones with a quadcopter shape (or alternatives, such as hexacopters, that add more arms) produce the most stable photo and video because they can steadily hold their position in the air.
Crash-avoidance sensors: Many modern drones have sensors that detect obstacles approaching in any direction and can avoid them. We prefer drones with this technology, as it removes a lot of stress for new flyers, but most budget options lack these features, so we make exceptions for drones under $500.
High-quality camera: Generally, the more you pay for a photography drone, the better the camera it has. We consider only those models that can shoot at least 12-megapixel photos and capture smooth 4K video.
Three-axis gimbal: A good gimbal stabilizes an attached camera with accelerometers and gyroscopes even when you are flying in wind or a jerky pattern, and it’s essential if you want usable footage.
Long battery life: Longer-lasting batteries tend to be larger and weigh more, so manufacturers try to balance drone size with battery life. But a shorter flight time means fewer shots, shorter videos, and less flexibility. We prefer drone batteries that last at least 30 minutes, and we recommend that pilots pick up a few extras so that they can spend more time flying.
Autonomous modes: Any video drone worth buying has a fail-safe return-home mode that automatically brings the aircraft back to the launch point when you press a button or the drone loses contact with the controller. Additionally, we prefer drones that come preprogrammed with cinematic autonomous flight modes; with the touch of a button, you can tell a drone to follow you while you snowboard down a mountain, for instance, or fly in a circle while filming you for a dramatic selfie.
Portability: The best drones are portable enough to be an everyday tool, as they’re small and light enough to fit into a camera bag or backpack.
Long flight range: Federal rules say that you must always keep a drone within your line of sight. But in special cases, a drone’s ability to fly an especially long distance without losing contact with a controller can be a useful feature.
Intuitive controller: Most drone controllers have two joysticks for controlling flight and a smattering of buttons for specific tasks, as well as a spot for mounting a smartphone to deliver the video feed and allow the pilot to use various smart flight modes. Some controllers, such as the DJI RC, come with a built-in screen; though convenient, this feature isn’t strictly necessary.

To test each drone, we shot photos and videos to evaluate camera quality; the process also helped us to gauge stabilization ability and to see whether propellers appeared in any of the shots.

In addition, we tried all of the advertised intelligent flight modes and crash-avoidance systems by flying the drones through trees. We tested maneuverability and controller sensitivity by flying fast, with lots of turns.

We’ll continue to send our picks up in a variety of weather conditions, and we’ll update this guide if we find that they struggle or excel in certain circumstances.
Our pick: DJI Air 3
The DJI Air 3 hovering in the air in a snowy yard.
Photo: James Austin
Top pick
DJI Air 3
The best drone for aerial photos and videos

This drone offers impressive value, combining the 360-degree obstacle avoidance of the more expensive DJI Mavic 3 Pro with two fantastic cameras.
$1,549 from Amazon
(Fly More Combo)
$1,493 from Walmart
$1,550 from Best Buy
(Fly More Combo)

The DJI Air 3 is the best drone for budding aerial photographers and videographers because of its automated obstacle avoidance, two high-quality cameras, and overall ease of use. Although our upgrade pick, the DJI Mavic 3 Pro, gives you even better camera quality and battery life, the Air 3 is impressive enough to please most people—for half the price.

It avoids obstacles with ease. The Air 3 can detect obstacles as they approach—from any direction—and then make flight-path adjustments to avoid them. When we deliberately tried to fly the Air 3 straight at a tree or slam it into the ground, the drone emitted a loud beep and stopped itself or simply continued around the obstacle.

This 360-degree obstacle avoidance also allows for a more robust ActiveTrack feature, which directs the drone to follow a subject or yourself. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but in our testing it never ended up running the drone sideways into a tree (which has been known to happen with previous models).

In general, obstacle sensing removes stress from the flying experience, both when you’re flying manually and when you’re using DJI’s preprogrammed or autonomous-flight options, which is why we’re so happy to see the tech trickle down from the Mavic Pro series.

The two-camera system is versatile and high-quality. The Air 3’s main camera has a 1/1.3-inch sensor, which is smaller than that of its predecessor, the Air 2S (and the same size as the sensors on the Mini 3, Mini 3 Pro, and Mini 4 Pro). But it still manages to get dynamic, high-quality footage. Its lens also has a larger, f/1.7 aperture, letting in more light than the Air 2S to capture sharp, well-stabilized 4K video at up to 100 frames per second. It grabs good-looking 20-megapixel stills, too.

The 70mm-equivalent telephoto camera is mounted just above the main camera and has the same 1/1.3-inch sensor but a smaller, f/2.8 aperture. That camera doesn’t capture as much detail in low light as the main camera does, but its longer focal length provides additional flexibility in shot composition and can give you a different look than drone videographers have grown used to with models in this price range.

In our tests, the Air 3’s video was crisp, without any post-shoot color-balancing required, though we still preferred the colors that came out of the Mavic 3 Pro’s Hasselblad camera.

It handles gusty conditions with aplomb. While flying in winds measured at about 14 mph, the Air 3 was unfailingly stable. It didn’t drift, and it consistently recorded steady video, even when it rose above the tree line or dealt with unpredictable wind shear coming off mountain peaks.

Other, comparably sized DJI drones we tested performed similarly, but every Mini-series drone was more affected by wind. Like many drones, the Air 3 uses a combination of Galileo, GPS, and BeiDou satellites, as well as its vision cameras, to monitor movement and altitude changes.

The battery lasts long enough. With a stated battery life of up to 46 minutes—a claim that seemed accurate, as we found in our testing—the Air 3 can fill its 8 GB of internal memory space with video footage well before it’s forced to land for a swap. And that means you’ll probably want to add a microSD card for most flights.

DJI’s automated-flight modes are great (in certain situations). Of the handful of modes, we most often used ActiveTrack, which is good enough to stay with a walking subject, occasionally has trouble keeping up with a subject on a bike, and tends to get left behind by anything faster than that.

In QuickShots mode, the Air 3 can autonomously film elaborate cinematic shots, such as circling around a subject or zooming away from it. A mode called MasterShots combines several filming effects and then creates a short video for you. It wasn’t particularly useful in our testing, but it might be instructive for newer pilots familiarizing themselves with the visual vocabulary of drone cinematography.

It’s compact and lightweight. The Air 3 measures 8 by 3.5 by 3.25 inches when folded—about the size of a large coffee thermos—and weighs 1.5 pounds. The RC 2 controller that comes with it in DJI’s Fly More Combo is a little bigger than a slice of bread and about twice as thick. You can slip both into a camera bag easily or stow them in a purse or backpack.

It has great range. The Air 3 is capable of flying up to 12 miles away, though federal regulations say that you must keep a drone within your line of sight, so it’s safe to say that you’ll rarely test that range. It transmits video and remote-controller data via DJI’s OccuSync 4.0 system, which we’ve found to be reliable.

DJI’s controller software is robust. You can use DJI’s Fly app—which comes ready to use on the RC 2 controller—for drone calibration, camera settings, GPS maps, and intelligent flight modes. It also tracks all of your flight information (which you can replay if you’re trying to repeat a shot), warns you about any flight restrictions in the area, and offers built-in video-editing tools, which you can use on the controller itself or through the mobile app on your phone.

The controller is easy to use. In our tests, the drone responded nimbly to our commands, even while flying in its faster and more agile Sport mode. We also had no difficulty adjusting the tilt of the drone’s camera with the controller’s built-in wheel and pressing the dedicated buttons that prompt the camera to take a picture or start filming.
Flaws but not dealbreakers

Like other Chinese brands, DJI has come under scrutiny from the US government and security researchers regarding security concerns. In addition, Android users have to download the DJI Fly app from DJI’s website instead of the Google Play store. We’ve included a few notes about the security and privacy of DJI drones below.
The Air 3 has a smaller camera sensor than the Mavic 3 Pro does, and it’s also smaller than that of the Air 2S. Its videos looked sharp enough for posting to YouTube and social media, but the Mavic 3 Pro’s videos looked even clearer, with better colors.
This drone quickly uses up its 8 GB of internal storage when shooting at its highest resolutions. That isn’t a major concern since high-capacity microSD cards are plentiful and cheap. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have a bit more built-in storage for those occasions when, say, you hike 2 miles to a spot you want to film only to realize that you left your memory card in another drone back in the car.