crashed my mavic pretty hard into a tree branch last month, not a catastrophic crash, just clipped it and it fell maybe 4 meters into grass. the drone itself is totally fine, motors fine, everything flies great. but the gimbal now has this slow drift on the roll axis. like when i watch the footage back the horizon slowly tilts over about 30 seconds and then snaps back. its subtle but completely ruins longer shots.

ive done the gimbal calibration like three times, tried it on flat surfaces, tried it hanging in the air, no change. the gimbal physically looks fine to me, no cracked arm or anything obvious. im wondering if its an IMU thing inside the gimbal itself or if one of the ribbon cables got damaged slightly in the impact.

DJI wants a stupid amount to look at it and honestly im pretty handy with electronics so im tempted to open it up. anyone been down this road

the ribbon cable thing is actually pretty likely. ive seen that exact drift symptom from a partially damaged flex cable on the pitch/roll motor feedback loop. the gimbal loses positional accuracy intermittently and it drifts until it gets a strong enough signal to correct. opening it isnt that scary if you go slow, theres good teardown content for mavics out there. just be careful with the ribbon connectors themselves because the ZIF sockets on these are fragile and youll make things worse if you force anything.

yeah DJI repair pricing is basically a joke, ive just learned to either fix things myself or buy a used unit for parts. that said, before you open it up did you try a full IMU calibration not just gimbal cal? sometimes after an impact the main flight IMU gets slightly off and the gimbal compensation goes weird trying to correct for it. probably not the issue you described but worth five minutes before cracking it open