Dji Mini 3 Pro 12MP vs. 48MP photo comparison
There’s an option in Dji Mini 3 Pro to take either 12MP or 48MP photos. I wanted to see what’s the difference between the two, other than the size of the photo.
Both photos were taken with same settings (1/500sec, ISO100, RAW). One in normal 12MP mode and the other in 48MP mode. I edited the photos in Adobe Camera Raw by adding +100 to shadows and decreasing -100 from highlights to make the differences more visible.
First comparison is with sharpening and noise reduction set to 0.
You can download the full size JPEGs at the end of the post.
Now lets see the differences.
The 48MP photo seems to have some green color cast, especially in the shadow areas
Lets zoom in a little closer to see the details. The 12MP photo is zoomed 2x more than the 48MP photo to make up for its smaller size
The 48MP photo is sharper, but noisier
There’s some extra details in the shadow areas of the 48MP photo, but mostly it’s just noise
This image shows well the added noise in the shadow areas of the 48MP photo
Next I adjusted sharpening and noise reduction for both of the photos to see what kind of detail I can get out of them. This was done individually for both of the photos.
The green color cast is still there after the noise reduction
Zooming in
The 12MP image seems a little bit over sharpened at this part of the image. The detail on the trees of the 48MP photo seems worse
This image shows the green color cast of the 48MP photo clearly. There’s little more detail in the 12MP photo
The forest on the 12MP photo looks much cleaner. Contrast is better on the 12MP photo
Conclusion
Comparing the two photos shows that there is no reason to use the full 48MP resolution of the sensor, at least in these kind of conditions. It’s actually worse. The pixel binning of the camera does a good job increasing the Signal-to-noise ratio of the sensor and thus reducing the noise of the image. The results are better than could be easily achieved in post processing.
The 48MP RAW photos are 95Mb in size compared to 24Mb of the 12MP so it’s also a nice space saving method.
Maybe in some situations it would make sense to use the 48MP mode, but I’m happy with these results and I’m going to keep shooting in 12MP mode.
You can download the full size JPEGs from below:
