DJI Mini 2 SE: A Bone Crone Drone

Tempelhof Airport, Berlin

Let's have a look at the DJI Mini 2 SE, a budget-priced drone that was released in early 2023. It may or may not have been discontinued by the time you read these words. Is it any good? It's okay. It's very basic. But if you've got an itchin' to try out a drone, the Mini 2 SE is a... scratching stick, or something, but it's a drone.

I'm old enough to remember when drones were army things. They cost millions of dollars and dropped bombs. They were the size of actual aircraft, because that's exactly what they were:

Courtesy of the US Navy

But then, seemingly overnight, drones became tiny little things you could buy in a supermarket. What happened?

To touch the face of God

I have no idea, but my hunch is that at some point in the early 2010s a combination of new lightweight plastics, high-power rechargeable batteries, smartphones with high-resolution screens, tiny little engines, internet cloud services, clever little magnetic motors, fingertip-sized GPS receivers, all of those things converged to a point where consumer drones became feasible. Does that sound okay? It's good enough.

I learn from the internet that the pioneer was a French company called Parrot, whose AR.Drone attracted a lot of attention back in 2010. Reading through contemporary reviews I have the impression that neither Parrot nor the reviewers understood drones, presumably because they were so new. Parrot believed that the future of drones was indoor drone races and drone laser tag, which sounds odd nowadays.

The AR.Drone had an unstabilised 640x480 camera, and it could only fly about a hundred feet away from the controlling mobile phone. The problem is that the whole infrastructure of Google Panoramas and movie-quality Youtube video reviews of motorcycles etc didn't exist back then, so drones didn't have a convincing reason to be.

The AR.Drone was followed in 2013 by the cradle-shaped DJI Phantom, from China. Drones coincided with the rise of Alibaba and the direct-from-China business model, and within a few years the consumer market became dominated by China's DJI, along with dozens, perhaps hundreds of generically-branded Chinese drones. Parrot themselves withdrew from the consumer market in 2019.

DJI has been controversial over recent years. The US government is worried that the company is a tool of Chinese espionage, but on the other hand DJI's drones have an infrastructure, and they're really cheap, and if a man chooses to accept money or goods from the Chinese government in exchange for favourable coverage, who I am to judge that man, even if that man is myself, which I hasten to add has not been proven in a court of law.

In the United States the Federal Aviation Authority finally got around to regulating drones in 2015, which opened the floodgates. Until that point drones had existed in the same grey areas as electric scooters and vapes, but from 2015 they were legit. The general rule in the US, UK, and other parts of the world is that a drone with a weight less than 250gm is classified as a toy, with light-touch regulation, while anything larger requires some kind of certification.

Here in the UK the law is slightly muddled, in the sense that sub-250gm drones that are toys do not require registration, but there's no firm legal definition of what constitutes a toy. In the EU the DJI Mini 2 SE is a category C0 drone, which is covered by a similar rule, but again it's unclear whether the Mini 2 SE is a toy or not.

To avoid all doubt I have registered myself as an operator-flyer, which costs £11 and requires that I stick my operator number somewhere on the drone. There are two types of registration - the owner of the drone is an operator, the flyer of the drone is a flyer, and an owner who flies their drone is both an operator and a flyer. I think the rule is intended to cover people who own a lot of drones and lease them out, or people who want to buy a drone so that their child can fly it.

In the UK the law is such that the drone must keep below 120m / 400 feet from ground level, and at least 50m / 160 feet from groups of people, and you should not fly over people at any height, but with a sub-250gm drone you are allowed to fly over your friends. I live in the countryside, where I have access to open space, but on the other hand a lot of local people own shotguns - ideal anti-drone weapons - so I have tried very hard not to annoy anybody.

Can you fly under people? Can you fly inside them? The law does not say.

The world seemed to lose interest with drones in the late 2010s, because the novelty wore off, and of course COVID forced everybody to huddle indoors. But the 2022 war in Ukraine brought drones right slap-bang into the news again.

I remember seeing a clip on r/combatfootage of young Ukrainian soldiers riding into battle on the back of an armoured personnel carrier, with one of their number - he looked about sixteen - wearing a pair of VR goggles as he launched a drone. It was a cheap little toy-like drone, but it could spy on Russian positions or drone small grenades. It was like looking at the future, but it was real.

The widespread availability and use of £250 drones on the battlefield has sent shivers through the world of military strategy, which might explain why the DJI Mini 2 SE is continually out of stock.

When folded down the Mini 2 SE is a tiny thing. The remote control connects to a smartphone, either Android or iOS. It uses the screen as a live camera. There are custom mounts for tablets.

Spec-wise the Mini 2 SE has a 12mp camera with a focal length of 4.49mm, which equates to 24mm in grown-up camera terms. It isn't quite ultrawide but it's still very wide. It has manual exposure, or alternatively auto-exposure with exposure compensation. It takes images in either JPG or DNG digital negatives. Straight from the camera the JPG images are a bit flat and dull, not necessarily a bad thing because they can be post-processed:

JPG images have a lot of sharpening, and the JPG engine corrects some hefty barrel distortion. The DNGs aren't as sharpened. Here's an example, with a DNG at the top:

There isn't much benefit to shooting DNG. You get a bit more control over sharpening and white balance, but the files don't have much more dynamic range than the JPGs, so unless you're very careful with exposure it's easy to blow out clouds. It's not like a digital SLR, where you can generally claw back several stops of brightness by shooting RAW files. The Mini 2's small sensor has limited dynamic range, for example in the following still from a video:

The sky and clouds are correctly exposed, but the shadowy area on the left is too noisy to be lifted up very much. On the one hand it serves me right for filming in direct sunlight, and this would be a difficult exposure with any sensor, but on the other hand sometimes you have to make do with what you have.

The Mini 2 SE captures video at 1080p (2mp, 1920x1080) or 2.7k (3.6mp, 2704x1520), while the regular and now discontinued Mini 2 had the option of 4k video. Unlike helmet-mounted cameras the Mini 2 uses gimbal-based stabilisation rather than electronic stabilisation, e.g. the video head tilts and rolls and swivels in order to keep the image level. On the whole the drone does a good job of staying put in the sky. Here's a short video I took with the drone hovering at about fifty feet:

The Mini 2 SE uses GPS to sense its position and a downward-pointing sensor to land. It's smart enough to stay a couple of feet from the ground, but it's not smart enough to avoid trees or power lines. As a consequence it's a good idea, nay a legal requirement, to keep the drone under visual observation at all times.

An example of motion blur, taken while spinning the drone around in dim light

There's a surprisingly large market for third-party filters. One issue is shutter speed. The lens has a fixed f/2.8 aperture, so exposure is controlled primarily with shutter speed, which tends to be very high in bright sunlight. Not an issue with still photographs, but if you're shooting video with a fast shutter speed the results look staccato, like the combat footage in Saving Private Ryan. There's a market for tiny neutral density filters that can be used to slow the shutter speed down, which makes motion footage look smoother.

The Mini 2 SE's maximum flight time is in theory 30 minutes, but in my experience this drops alarmingly if there's any wind. The remote control has a transmission range of 4km, according to DJI's website, and a ceiling of 4000 metres / 13,000 feet. Is that a practical limit? Possibly, if you plan to take some drone footage while climbing in the Alps. The Eiger is about that height, the Matterhorn a thousand feet higher. My hunch is that if you tried to launch the Mini 2 SE from the summit of the Matterhorn the engine would quickly overheat and give up.

Here in the UK the tallest mountain is Ben Nevis, at a considerably less dramatic 4,000 feet. The Mini 2 SE has a maximum vertical speed of 5m/s, so on paper it would take just over four minutes to reach the summit of Ben Nevis from sea level, but the motors would probably not enjoy being run at full power non-stop for minutes on end.

The remote has a switch that selects between CINE, NORMAL, and SPORT modes, which limit the drone's top speed - slower for CINE, faster for SPORT.

Drones aren't just useful for birds-eye photographs of rivers etc. They can also double as general-purpose stabilised cameras, which might handy if you're selling a vintage car, or a yacht, and you want a top-down view.

The Mini 2 SE's operating software has some frustrating limits. The DJI app has a number of spirally, back-and-forth, up-down-down flight modes, but the Mini 2 can't be told to follow a series of waypoints or follow the drone operator. It can be programmed to return to the initial take-off point, but that's about it for intelligent navigation. If you plan to film yourself driving around the countryside on a motorcycle, a la FortNine, you'll need an assistant drone operator. Could you fly the drone into position, run back to the motorcycle, drive past the drone, then drive back, then land the drone? Well, you could, but it would be illegal, and a massive pain.

Curiously the DJI app, DJI Fly, isn't available on Google Play. You have to download and install it manually from DJI's website, which is unusual. The in-built map includes an overlay of restricted airspace zones, but it's up to you to ensure that you don't violate restricted airspace. When DJI Fly turns on - which takes ages - the map defaults to Beijing, which is strange because DJI is based in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong. Do you need internet access when you fly? Not as far as I can tell, but it's a good idea to have it so that you can keep the map updated.

There is another issue. As far as I can tell the drone is completely reliant on DJI Fly. If DJI ever abandons the app, or flicks a switch that disables the Mini 2 SE, the drone will become a useless piece of junk. Something similar happened to Parrot's drones when that company left the consumer market. If you're really serious or just slightly paranoid my suggestion is that you buy a second-hand Android phone, load DJI Fly onto it, make sure it works, and then put it in a desk drawer and never connect it to the internet.

Build-quality-wise the Mini 2 feels incredibly flimsy, but that's par for the course for something designed to fly. It has to be as lightweight as possible, and I can't really criticise it for feeling like a toy. The prop blades are replaceable, and it has a removable battery, but beyond that if something goes wrong it's basically a very lightweight brick.

Why did I buy a drone? Fourteen years ago I bought a Canon 5D MkII, which was one of the first digital SLR cameras with a video mode. It was a game-changer, but after using it for a while I encountered the same problems that struck filmmakers in the early 1900s - a static camera makes for dull cinematography. Getting a digital SLR to move smoothly is difficult, and making a 1.5kg camera fly through the air in a controlled manner is a major technical challenge. In that respect drones are game-changing. Not only can they take photographs that would in the past have required a helicopter, a la Earth From the Air, they can be used as general-purpose stabilised cameras.

If nothing else they're extraordinarily useful for establishing shots. If you're making a video essay and you need a shot that says "This is Canada", "This is Rural France", "This is Iceland", a drone is fantastic. Imagine if all the actors in a film could be mounted to robotic armatures, and the cameras attached to drones. The entire production could be motion-controlled and recorded for future playback. The possibilities are endless.

Actually flying the Mini 2 SE is remarkably simple, especially if you're used to video games. DJI Fly even has an operating mode that mimics console controls, with the left stick controlling motion and the right stick controlling heading. There doesn't seem to be a way to invert the Y axis, so up is forward on the stick rather than backwards. I've managed to get used to it. Flying a drone reminds me a little bit of playing helicopter flight simulators on the PC. It's easy to move the drone too fast in one direction, then overcompensate in the other direction, but if you release the controls the drone settles into a hover.

Landing is automated. The drone refuses to descend below about two feet. At that height the rotors generate a surprising amount of wind, so if you bring along a portable landing pad - even if it's just a large piece of folded cardboard - make sure to hold it down with rocks. The first time I landed my Mini 2 SE the rotors got caught up in some grass, but there didn't appear to be any damage. There is a thriving third party market for blade guards and portable landing pads.

The Mini 2's biggest limitation is a general one that applies to all drones. After a short while it's easy to exhaust the pool of local scenic spots that look good from the air and also allow drone flights. I mentioned the Earth From the Air chap up the page. He didn't become famous just because he had access to a helicopter. He also had access to a huge variety of interesting locations all around the world at sunrise or sunset, and that took time, money, and dedication. You need those things things as well.

And that's the DJI Mini 2 SE. It's a simple take-off-and-take-photographs drone, without the complex flight modes of more expensive drones, so if you plan to emulate Revzilla or FortNine et al you'll need an assistant. If you plan to make a name for yourself it would be handy to have access to Peru, Iceland, St Helena, and an all-terrain motorcycle.

DJI sells the Mini 2 SE direct for around £249, but as mentioned earlier on it appears to be on the verge of discontinuance, so by the time you read this it might only be available on the used market. Is there a market for second-hand drones? They aren't known for their robustness, but that's the price that must be paid for being gossamer-light. The things we value... something something. Things that fade. That was how the saying went. Something something things that fade. How true that is.

Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED

Let's have a look at the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED. The first one. From the 1980s. The first one. Let's have a look at it. The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED, from the 1980s.

It's the chap in the middle here:

In the middle there. The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 is a fast telephoto zoom with a pushy-pully-twisty-turny design. It was launched in late 1987, and at the time it was Nikon's top-of-the-range photojournalistic lens. My hunch is that many thousands of images of Milli Vanilli, Madonna, and the Berlin Wall were taken with a lens very much like this one, perhaps mounted on a Nikon F4, which was released a few months later.

Nowadays it's one of the cheapest decent 80-200mm f/2.8 lenses on the used market, partially because of its age - it was discontinued in 1992, so mine is at least 31 years old - and partially because it uses screw drive autofocus, which is fading out of history.

What is screw drive autofocus? From 1985 until roughly the turn of the millennium Nikon's cameras had a system whereby the autofocus motor was in the camera body, with the gears in the lens. The motor drove the gears in the lens with a little spring-loaded screw.

The system worked, but it was noisy and buzzy, and it had trouble with big telephoto lenses, so starting in the late 1990s Nikon gradually switched to a new arrangement that had all of the mechanical bits inside the lens, which meant that different lenses could have different motors etc.

As of 2024 a couple of Nikon's top SLRs still have a screw drive motor, and at least here in in the UK Nikon still sells the screw-drive 50mm f/1.8D, but screw-drive lenses are a dying breed. None of the new Z cameras use it.

They're interesting on the used market because they mostly still work with modern Nikon cameras - at the very least the aperture mechanism and exposure system work - and if you're prepared to focus manually they can be a bargain.

The three lenses pictured above illustrate three different generations of fast telephoto zooms. The Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1 on the left is a manual focus lens from the 1970s that attracted a lot of press at the time. It was slightly longer, slightly wider, and slightly faster than the 80-200mm f/4 zoom lenses of the day. It also had a clever macro mode that went down to a surprisingly close 1:4.

It's actually not bad by modern standards, if you stop it down a little bit, viz the following images shot at a local air show with this lens on a Fuji S5 at f/5.6:

The Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 ED is a decade newer, with autofocus, and the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS on the right is newer still, with image stabilisation. It was launched in 2001, which is technically almost a quarter of a century ago but still feels like the modern age.

Belluno, in the foothills of the Alps

I'm not going to formally compare the three lenses. They are however essentially a stop apart - the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 is sharp in the middle at 200mm f/2.8, the Nikon 80-200mm doesn't get as sharp until f/4, the Vivitar 70-210mm is the same again but at f/5.6.

The Vivitar 70-210mm has some nasty purple fringing in the edges that never goes away. It works best on crop-sensor cameras, where the edges are cropped out. The coatings or glass of the two autofocus lenses mostly eliminate red/green and blue/yellow colour fringing, but the Nikon 80-200mm has purply highlights wide open, perhaps because it was designed in the film era.

The Vivitar 70-210mm is noticeably more zoomy at the long end than the 80-200mm, more than the 10mm difference would suggest, which makes me wonder if the 80-200mm is more like an 80-180mm.

Let's see what the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 is like. The following image was shot with a fourteen megapixel, full-frame Kodak DCS 14n using the 80-200mm at 200mm. This is straight from the camera, hence the tilt and the unretouched dust spots. f/2.8 is at the top and f/4 is at the bottom:

The vignetting is still obvious at f/4, but it's not especially offensive. Up-close at f/2.8 the 80-200mm is obviously softer, with a purple colour cast, but not disastrously so, and it's probably not an issue if you're photographing portraits (again with f/2.8 at the top and f/4 at the bottom):

Subjectively the whole image is sharp across the frame at 80mm f/4 and 200mm f/5.6, and even wide open only the very edges are blurry, and then only slightly.

Here's a more extreme example of purple, again at 200mm f/2.8 and then f/4 - pay particular attention to the BMW logo:

Do you know what BMW stands for? It stands for BE-ME-WE. The company was founded in the late 1960s by a hippie who was keen on communal living. He believed that we should all BE, and that we should eliminate ME and become WE instead. Later in life he developed a type of house that used bottles and cans as building materials. His name? Brian Malcolm Williams. Of Cologne, Germany.

The purple fringing is an issue if you're photographing shiny things, although it has to be said that Photoshop will easily fix that. Unless the subject is also purple, in which case the job is more complicated. The only other optical problem is a hefty dose of pincushion distortion at 200mm, noticeable here at the top of the image (the metal barrier was straight and level in real life):

Historically the 80-200mm f/2.8 ED was one of the first lenses for the Nikon autofocus system. It was released back in 1987, a year after the Nikon F-501, which was Nikon's first modern autofocus SLR. The first batch of Nikon AF lenses had naff-looking shiny black plastic bodies, but the 80-200mm f/2.8 has an attractive crinkle finish that looks more modern than 1987.

Mine is the original, mark one version, which has a three-position focus limit ring. I left it in the "full" position because I paid for the lens and I'm going to use every bit of it. The focus limiter works with a pull and a twist. I suppose it would be handy if you were at an airshow or sports venue etc and you expected to focus on distant things all the time.

When the autofocus system misses the lens takes a couple of seconds to whizz from far to near and back again, and it's very noisy, but the only time I've managed to completely fool the autofocus system was by trying to photograph things through rainy glass windows or fences etc.

The minimum focus distance is about a metre and a half, which is standard for lenses of that era. The Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 from a decade later is the same. Unlike the Vivitar lens it doesn't have a special close focusing gear.

Incidentally ED stands for extra-low dispersion. It's a special type of glass designed to ensure that the different wavelengths of light focus at the exact same point. As mentioned up the page it works very well, although there's still a bit of purple.

In 1992 the mark one 80-200mm f/2.8 was replaced by a mark two version that had a focus limit switch instead of a ring. It also added distance information to the autofocus system - it was an AF-D-for-Distance lens - which tied in with Nikon's flash automation, although otherwise it was optically the same.

In turn the AF-D version of the lens was replaced in 1997 by a mechanically revised model with a twist-to-zoom design, although again the optical design was the same, or at least the number of elements and groups didn't change. It's entirely possible that the coatings were improved or the interior was tweaked somehow. Surprisingly the mark three screw-drive 80-200mm f/2.8 appears to still be on sale, or at least Nikon's US website lists it as a current product (at $1,224).

In 1998 Nikon launched a non-screw-drive 80-200mm f/2.8 that was briefly sold in parallel with the screw-drive 80-200mm. It was the first of Nikon's new non-screw-drive AF-S-for-Silent Wave lenses. It was only in production for a few years before being replaced by a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens that had image stabilisation.

Judging by the serial number mine is one of the earlier lenses, from 1987-1989, but the push-pull mechanism still feels grippy. The back end of the lens is sealed, and it seems tightly-made; mine doesn't have any obvious dust. It's a chunky, solid lens that doesn't rattle.

There are a couple of awkward things. Manual focus is activated with a clutch mechanism that involves pressing a button and twisting the entire barrel of the lens, which has the side-effect of preventing the lens from having a tripod foot, because the collar would have nowhere to go. The front element rotates as it focuses, and it sticks out, so you have to be careful not to bash it against anything. If you're using a polarising filter be sure to rotate the filter after you've focused.

As with all Nikon lenses from this period you have to make sure that the aperture ring is at f/22 when you put it on the camera, otherwise the electronics get confused, but that's a Nikon thing. Nikon people already know about that. Or at least older Nikon people know. Modern Nikon lenses don't have an aperture ring.

The bokeh isn't especially great, although with a 200mm f/2.8 it's easy enough to arrange the photo so that the background is a wash of colour. The following is an unusually bad example:

I think it's something to do with fishing. The only Italian I know comes from train announcements - allontanarsi dalla linea gialla is burned into my brain - but pesca looks like it has something to do with fish, so my hunch is that zona di pesca regolamentata is "zone of fishing regulations".

Can I sustain a relationship with an Italian woman if we only talk about yellow lines, platform numbers, and fishing regulations? Is that enough? No, it probably isn't enough.

No, hang on. I know messia satanico as well. That might be the clincher. "Je suis un messia satanico. Voulez-vous allontanarsi dalla linea gialla avec moi?" Could that work? Is that sexy? I'll have to try it out.

Those are the 80-200mm f/2.8's only bad things. On the positive side the colours are natural-looking. Saturated but not overpowering. In most of the images in this article I've boosted the contrast a bit, but the shot of the bridge above and the vertical alleyway a few paragraphs ago are straight-from-the-camera.

Flare? I have no idea, I didn't shoot into the sun. The 80-200mm has a 77mm filter thread. As far as I can tell Nikon's official hood screwed directly into the thread - the mark two lens had a bayonet mount - which strikes me as slightly unsafe given that the front element rotates. But perhaps it connected some other way. I'm not sure.

Italy wasn't designed for cars. Or rather the nice-looking bits weren't designed for cars. And even though there are masses of scooters, there are also masses of cars, because Italy isn't great if you're a pedestrian. It has pavements that end abruptly, out-of-town shops that are only a short walk from the town but inaccessible because there are no pavements, pedestrian crossings that favour cars etc. And yet it continues to exist.

Does the original 80-200mm make any sense nowadays? I'm not a Nikon person so I'm at a disadvantage here. It would be interesting to compare it with one of Nikon's modern 75-300mm f/4-5.6 consumer-level zooms with image stabilisation, or the perennial 180mm f/2.8. My hunch is that the image quality at f/8 would probably be about the same, and with the modern zoom you would be able to shoot at f/8 because of the image stabilisation, but there's a lot to be said for f/2.8. It subtly blurs out backgrounds and makes the subject stand out.

On the used market the early 80-200mm f/2.8s hover at around £250 or so, give or take £100 depending on condition, and of course the newest examples are very old. I waited ages for a good copy. I was originally going to pair it with a 35-70mm f/2.8, which was Nikon's contemporary fast normal zoom, but that thought reminds me of something else - the 35-70mm f/2.8 apparently has a problem with hazy elements that get worse with age, whereas judging by internet reviews the 80-200mm f/2.8 keeps on keeping on, because they were built to be used and bashed about by professionals.

And that is the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8. Good but not excellent wide open, slow and buzzy autofocus, really well-made, no obvious quirks, nice but not overpoweringly contrasty colours, cheap, durable, chunky, holds its value.