DJI made some great improvident with the camera system on the Mavic Air and just like the Phantom 4 Pro and Inspire 2 the Air supports new faster write speeds unto 100Mbps in 4K UHD, this means its able to get more detail into the footage however because of this you may get errors like Slow SD Card or SD Card To Slow with existing cards and this is because it may not support the faster write speeds now needed.
So What SD Card Do You Need ?
The fist thing to understand is we are only interested in write speeds, read speeds are much higher than write speed on cards and that has no impact on your crafts recording. There is also some terminology you need get to grips with here too as DJI list all of their models write speeds in Megabits per second, this is shown as Mbps, however SD Card manufactures tend to use Megabytes per second shown as MB/s to show how fast their cards are.
These are not the same and must not be confused as there is large speed difference between them. The 100Mbps listed by DJI is actually only 12.5MB/s so this must be taken into account when looking at specifacations.
So the main thing to take away here is the SD card you need actually only needs to be able to write at 13MB/s minimum.
As you can see from the above matrix the SD card speed classification system is a little all over the place, Class 10 cards have a minimum write speed on 10MB/s but this classification stops there to to find the card you need look at the U rating, for the DJI Mavic Air and all the models that record at 12.5MB/s (100Mbps) you are going to need a Class 10 U3 card to guarantee its going to work, this is not to say a Class 10 U1 card won’t work as these speeds are minimums but if your purchasing a card going with a U3 will ensure compatibility.
Well there are lots on the market but I specifically use SanDisk cards, these have given me many years of use with no issues at all and not a single data failue, my preferred card is the SanDisk Extreme 32GB model.
It easel copes with the required write speeds and is fairly cheap, I recommend using 32Gb cards over larger ones as this size gives the ideal level of recording time without being too expensive, also if you loose one or manage to break one as I have then your loosing too much money.
This card is available fairly cheap from both Amazon and DJI for around $20 and offer good value.
Another card is the SanDisk Extreme Pro, this model offers faster transfer speeds again but costs a few extra $$$, for use in DJI models this offers nothing over the Extreme model above.
The DJI Mavic Air is available from DJI and currently cost $799, for more information click here
DJI Mavic Air What SD Card ? DJI made some great improvident with the camera system on the Mavic Air and just like the Phantom 4 Pro and Inspire 2 the Air supports new faster write speeds unto 100Mbps in 4K UHD, this means its able to get more detail into the footage however because of this you may get errors like…