Here is my own personal opinion. I own an Anafi Thermal and at work we have a Mavic ED.
Aircraft
- The Mavic is the superior aircraft, but its not a clear cut win.
- The price is more so yes expect a better aircraft.
- The range is not even comparable, the Mavic's range is ridiculous, it can fly miles out with zero problems in connectivity, but Part 107's VLOS kind of defeats the range difference. But this long range from the Mavic also helps keep your connection strong in more heavy interference areas.
- The Anafi Range while not stellar is fine since the aircraft is so small its very easy to lose VLOS with it at most ranges
- The Mavic holds its position better than Anafi in hover
- The Mavic's ADS is very useful for safety. On a couple of occasions the warning came from smaller airplanes that were quite low, but the ADS-B system warned me ahead of time enabling me to bring my aircraft down
- The Anafi for some reason handles winds very well, probably better than the Mavic. My guess is less surface area to act as a sail?
- The Mavic is faster, but for me that does not mean anything
- Mavic has obstacle avoidance while Anafi has none
- Mavic is easy to attach Anti-collision lights and Navigation lights to and has plenty of third party mounting options. The Anafi is so small, I found it some work to get the above lighting attached securely
- Mavic has some useful attachments as you said with a Beacon, Speaker and Spotlight
- There are so many third party options, we have a drop system on our Mavic that can drop a self inflating flotation device. The Anafi cannot support any payload other than its camera and small lighting
Flight Software
- DJI's Pilot is very polished and does not have a long learning curve
- Settings make sense to me on how to use and where they are placed
- Battery settings and information is great, you get temperature and cell health
- Camera settings are adequate but the Mavic ED is not what to buy if you are doing photogrammetry or cinemetography.
- Parrot Free Flight software is also polished and easy to use. Going back and forth between the two drones is not too hard.
- Both keep flight logs and both files from those logs can be exported to popular Flight Log providers such as Drone Logbook
- The thermal camera management for both drones is quite good but read to the thermal comparison part to get my opinion on this
Controller
- Mavic's stock controller is okay and will accept most phones with no problem. Thicker phones or phones in thick battery cases may not fit well
- Using the Smart Controller with the Mavic is what makes this in my opinion a much better drone as in Emergency Response anything to help make it faster to launch is better
- Mavic lets you setup the extra buttons to control functions such as taking the camera from Nadir to Zenith and turning on and off attachments and accessories
- The Parrot Controller works well but lacks a power button. When you unfold it, it turns on
- The Parrot Controller feels cheap compared to the Mavic but it does work well
- Both can get attachments to support tablets, but the Smart Controller is what I use, while I use an iPad Pro 9.7 with the Anafi
- The Anafi's phone mount can and has with other people have the phone pop out and then hit the sticks causing near accidents or accidents
Thermal camera
- The Anafi can swivel its camera 180 degrees and look up
- The Mavic uses FLIR Lepton core 3.0 which is not advanced radiometric meaning it does not produce a JPEG-R that can be used in FLIR Tools for your post work
- The Parrot uses FLIR Lepton 3.5 which is true Radiometric. Snap a picture and then do all of your emissivity, wind, humidity, ambient temp and T Rflec settings from the comfort of your office
- Both thermals are only 160 resolution which is not going to be suitable for alot if not most situations, BUT the 160 thermals are better than no thermal and if you know their limitations, you can still do SAR and some thermography things such as roof scans, heat loss from buildings and of course firefighting (structural or wildland).
- Both thermals will need to be under 150 ft to be able to find people in SAR along with other environment issues
- Roof scans will need to be done 10 to 20 feet from the roof at the correct angle and time of day
- The lack of resolution on both make trying to do any quantitative thermography futile as there is not simply the resolution to do so on anything small. the pixel will be too large with the POI bleeding into pixels making your temp reading not true
- The Anafi uses the better Lepton core sensor and in my opinion integrates this sensor very well into its software
RGB camera
- The Anafi can swing its camera 180 degrees to be able to look up
- The Anafi's camera is the better camera in specs, picture quality and different modes
- Anafi 20 MP stills work well in Pix 4D, but be aware the 20 MP pictures are barrel or fish eyed. Pix 4D works around them, but these pictures need post work if you want to use them for other things
- The Mavic while only having 12MP stills are still nice quality pictures and while playing around with ISO and apperature you can take some nice pictures
- Both shoot 4K 30 fps video and I dont have a preference for either one
- I use the Anafi for photogrammetry and it does take very good stills. It is a rolling shutter so you will need to slow down while doing you data acquisition. Pix4D can work around rolling shutter distortions
- I have not used the Mavic ED for photogrammetry but when I try to use my Mavic Enterprise Zoom the results of Nadir stills are in my opinion terrible so far. I am still trying to change settings to achieve better results.
- Anafi has a ton of flight and picture modes so that part is really no comparison
- For some reason DJI took away the cool flight modes available in DJI Go from their enterprise drones
Battery
- In real world use I get similar times in the air with both aircraft being around 20 minutes. I try to have my birds on the ground at 15% minimum, but usually around 15 to 20%
- Both are smart batteries, but the Mavics can accept firmware upgrades
- The Mavics have alot more information available about their health, charge times and temperature
- The Anafi's can be charged from almost anyplace you can hook up a USB-C to while the Mavic's go on its included 4 battery hub.
- The Anafis charge all at once on its hub, while the Mavic charge in sequence one at a time
- Both will auto discharge and sleep after nonuse, but the Mavics can be set when you want this to happen
- The Mavics have a self heating function meaning this aircraft can operate at lower temps
Other
- The Mavic comes with a very professional case that will even hold the Smart Controller if you go that route
- The Anafi comes in a nice sturdy lunch bag type holder so the Mavic looks that part for Enterprise or public safety
- The Mavic and all things DJI are under attack right now on the Federal and even state level as a victim of the ongoing trade war. At my job we are unable at this time to plug any DJI product into the municipal network until further notice
- It looks likely that Federal grant money will not be able to be used to buy DJI products in the near future
- Both drones are very quick to deploy
- The Mavic's propellers attach easier and require no tool
- The Anafi is quieter and I find I can film events without disturbing people of the event itself
Photogrammetry
- The Anafi and Parrot have an affiliation with Pix4D so Pix4D Capture works great with it
- The Mavic and most DJI drones are supported well by Pix4D Capture
- The Anafi in a Youtube test of 3D modeling produced a much more accurate 3D model, with the Mavic Pro giving very poor results in lengths of items in the model, BUT this may have been fixed with firmware since the video is older and using Pix4D desktop with manual tie points and scale constraints will fix this, it may just be a problem when using Drone Deploy and Maps Made Easy since they are cloud based
- The Anafi's 20 MP stills will produce better results
- The Anafis built in Flight Mode can be used for mapping, but is no where neat optimal for this,, so use Pix4D capture
- The Mavic's Mission planning has waypoints but also a mapping setting letting you set overlap and grids and works very well, its just its 12MP camera takes less than stellar nadir images (This may be me as I am still experimenting with camera settings such as focusing, ISO and aperture)
Firefighting
- Both will do well in most situations as fires will have such a delta T that you will easily see temperature differences in most situations
- All thermals will need for the operator to understand proper angle so as to not get reflections and have to understand the limitations of thermal cameras
- There are plenty of studies showing that fire under a roof may not be seen on a thermal until the underlying roof structure is past compromised
- Understand that you must also look at gable vents and under the eaves especially in balloon type construction
- In Hazmat where you may need an exact or quantitative temperature you must understand emissivity and reflection as well as your ambient temps, humidity and angle. An example is organic peroxides and their MSST (Temperature at which when they go over they will violently decompose)
- In SAR know that you will need to be under 150 ft and have environmental conditions such as a day where the surroundings are not going to be the same temperature as a person
- We had a lifeguard go out and swim around while we tried to pick them up with the Mavic. We could not see him unless we were under 150ft and from 150ft to 100 ft he could be easily missed if it was at night. We had a Matrice 210 with an XT2 640 also and it saw him easily at 200ft and we could even make out fingers (Or should I say finger!) he held out to us
- As stated a low resolution thermal is better than no thermal, but understand that the Lepton has limitations
This is a bit off topic but check out these possibilities.
Yuneec 520 has swappable cameras and a 320 and 640 resolution FLIR Boson option
Autel Evo 2 will have FLIR 320 and 640 FLIR Boson options
Unknown if True radiometric will be available, but I think it will eventually
The higher resolution thermals will do everything better than the above Lepton cores so if you have time I would look at these promising options.
I have more but, I have to go and eat my turkey. Feel free to ask anything you want or contact me in private.
