Terrain mapping, Phantom 3 vs Mavic

[quaddamage]

Just wanted to share an image.

To cover the same amount of terrain, Mavic needs to fly 1/3 higher than Phantom 3 Pro.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should move to Mavic - it is so much easier to transport...

 

[Meta4]

To cover the same amount of terrain, Mavic needs to fly 1/3 higher than Phantom 3 Pro.
I'm still trying to decide whether I should move to Mavic - it is so much easier to transport

Your calculation is about right but there are some other things to consider.
If you are flying one of the photogrammetry programs like DroneDeploy, it's not necessary to fly higher to cover the same area.
You could fly at the same height but the grid you fly would be larger and include more photos to cover the same area.
Downside is longer flying time
Upside is more detail per individual image and a bigger, more detailed orthophoto.

 

[BigAl07]

@Meta4 is a mapping GuRu

 

[quaddamage]

You could fly at the same height but the grid you fly would be larger and include more photos to cover the same area.
Downside is longer flying time
Upside is more detail per individual image and a bigger, more detailed orthophoto.

Agree, but I would add another, huge downside - processing time quadruples when amount of photos doubles.
I'm not using an online service, doing 3D reconstruction and ortophotomap creation locally on my machine. A scene with 1000 photos takes a week on a decent HW, I don't think I would be able to wait more than two weeks.

A few years back when I used Ph2 with wide-angle 20mpx action cam, I was able to get 200 photos at 70m alt for a terrain for which Ph3 takes 1000 photos. Resolution was a bit lower, but I was able to process these Ph2 photos in 2-4 hours.