ok so context: i shoot a lot of commercial real estate and some landscape stuff and the X7 has been my workhorse for like two years. image quality is genuinely good especially with the DL lenses but im starting to feel limited by the Super 35 sensor when i compare my aerial footage to what my ground crew is getting on their full frame rigs. there's just a different look to it that clients are starting to notice and honestly im noticing it too.

ive been looking at going the route of lifting a proper mirrorless ? either the Sony a7R V or maybe the Nikon Z8 ? on a third party gimbal under an S1000+ type platform. the weight obviously becomes a real concern, the Z8 with a decent lens is going to push close to 2kg total payload easy. and then theres the whole integration question because you lose a lot of the nice stuff you get from having everything talk to each other natively like with the Matrice/Zenmuse combo.

has anyone actually made this jump and found it worth it for commercial work? im not doing mapping or anything that needs RTK so its purely about image quality. curious if the stabilization suffers noticeably when youre hauling that much weight

we made a similar switch about 18 months ago, went to an a7S III on a Gremsy Pixy U under a heavy lift hex. honestly the image quality difference is not subtle, especially in low light which the X7 always struggled with in my opinion. but yeah you lose a lot ? no live view metadata, manual lens control only, and getting smooth footage took way longer to dial in than i expected. the stabilization is fine once youre balanced properly but it took us probably 6-8 flights before we stopped getting occasional jello artifacts.

for real estate i think it depends on your clients tbh. most of them wont care but if youre doing luxury properties where theyre comparing your aerials side by side with a RED or Alexa on a crane, yeah the difference matters.

the integration loss is real and i dont think people talk about it enough. i tried lifting a Panasonic S5 for a while and just the fact that i couldnt easily pull focus remotely or see what the camera was actually exposing without a separate monitor situation made it genuinely annoying on jobs where time matters. went back to a native solution. the image quality was better sure but the workflow pain wasnt worth it for me personally, mileage may vary