ok so my buddy keeps pushing me toward the autel evo lite+ because he had a bad experience with dji's customer service and basically has sworn them off. i get it, i really do, but i rented both for a weekend trip and i'm kinda strugling to see where autel is actually better in practical use.

the air 2s images are just sharper and the colors feel more natural out of the log profile when i grade them. the autel footage isnt bad, its actually pretty good, but when i put clips side by side there's a difference. the autel app also kept doing this thing where it would lose connection to the drone for like 2-3 seconds and then reconnect, happened maybe 5 or 6 times over two days. could have been my phone but still made me nervous.

autel definitely wins on customer service reputation and the fact that they dont geofence everything to death. that part is genuinely nice. and the variable aperture on the lite+ is something the air 2s doesnt have which matters in some situations i guess.

is there something im missing about the autel that makes people love it? or is it really just a case of people buying it specifically to avoid dji for non-technical reasons. not trying to be dismissive just genuinely curious what the actual autel fans think

autel guy here and i'll be honest with you, the air 2s is probably the better drone on raw performance metrics. i wont pretend otherwise. i switched because after dji locked my mavic 2 pro out of a flight zone that was clearly legal airspace without any recourse it just left a bad taste. the autel geofencing is so much more reasonable and for the kind of flying i do that matters more than slightly better noise performance at iso 3200 or whatever.

the variable aperture thing is actually useful if you fly a lot in changing light conditions without wanting to mess with NDs, but yeah if you're mostly doing controlled shoots it's not a game changer. the app stability thing you mentioned is a known issue with certain android phones, on iphone it's been rock solid for me for over a year.

the air 2s is just better and everyone knows it lol. autel makes decent stuff but they're like 18 months behind dji at any given moment. that said if dji ever actually does the thing where they require you to register through their servers to fly (not the faa stuff, the dji account thing) then i might actually reconsider. keeping an eye on it