I bought a Mavic 3 Pro last weekend, and it’s my first experience with the RC. I’ve owned the Air 2S since launch 4 years ago, and the RC-N1 was great to use with my phone.
The RC experience has been so much worse so far. It takes a minute or so to get to the live feed. Screen taps are delayed by 2-3 seconds, sometimes more. POI and focus (where you draw a square/rectangle around something to track it) are almost unusable. The drone softly snaps to the side during an orbit and loses track most of the time. I shoot a lot of real estate and rely heavily on those two features. I can do it manually, but it’s nice to have automation. For a 4-year-old drone that cost half of what the 2-year-old 3P does, to perform better with tracking doesn’t seem right at all. All the firmware is updated too.
I know I can pair my RC-N1 to the 3P, but having a screen that doesn’t dim from heat like my iPhone 16 Pro Max does is a huge bonus, especially now that it’s getting warmer. I’ve really enjoyed the custom buttons on the back as well.
The RC is the base model controller, and it’s slow. The RC Pro has night and day differences with responsiveness to touching the screen, brighter screen, more customization buttons, and you can use other Android apps. This is just some of the main points having a faster CPU and more memory cache does for performance. It’s also a lot more money. You also mentioned the drone’s tracking ability. As a test for tracking ability, you could try your older RC-N1 and see if you get better results. If you do, then you could consider upgrading your controller to the RC Pro. There’s also the enterprise controller, which has even faster performance, a bigger and brighter screen, and firmware for the RC Pro that now works with the Mavic 3 Pro. It’s actually cheaper off eBay (like $500-600), but it has some limitations. Basically, it functions as well as the RC Pro but on steroids. I went with the RC Pro because I have 2 years of refresh care and didn’t want to cause a technicality if I needed to make a claim. DJI will ask for your flight logs and see it’s not a stock controller. Let us know how it goes. I hope this helps. Cheers.
@Roan
Thanks for all the info. Again! You helped out on my last post a lot. I tried the RC-N1 earlier and it still had the Spotlight/POI issues. DJI Support is passing it on to tech support, and they’re going to contact me.
I wish I could do the RC Pro, just not in the budget right now. I’ll probably just end up using the RC-N1 most of the time since it was so much more responsive than the RC.