X7 blur & smear at ISO800 or higher - unusable photos

Hi all,

We have an issue where our X7 is completely unusable at any ISO setting of 800 or higher. The photos are blurry and look to have a 'smear' like effect all over them. DJI claim this is high iso noise but I dont think thats correct, as there is no 'noise' present. Anyone else had this issue?

Photo below is ISO200 on left and ISO800 on right. Note the edge of the building and the antenna? Its almost like an anti-aliasing effect.

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  • Michael,
    I don't see any obvious reason for the issue based on the EXIF matadata.

    Since you said that shooting in RAW looks good I am guessing the JPG format must be being processed for some reason, possibly for noise reduction, which causes the blurring. 

    Since higher ISO values usually introduce noise into photos, DJI may automatically apply noise reduction when shooting JPG, but not when shooting RAW. The higher the ISO, the more noise reduction gets applied. You did say DJI claim this is high iso noise.

    You might want to shoot RAW to avoid this problem. If you need JPG files you can always convert the RAW to JPG with something like Adobe Camera RAW which should give you much better results.

    Regards,
    Ron

  • Thank Ron. The older X4S and X5 dont exhibit this issue which is frustrating as this is a $6k camera and its performance is sub-par.

    Shooting RAW isn't really possible for us unfortunately. If we are flying along we need to take an image every ~2seconds which is too much data being written to the memory card for the system to handle in RAW. Not to mention for a large job of 15,000 to 20,000 photos the data size would increase from around 200gb to over a 1TB