DJI certainly seems to be the 800lb gorilla in the Drone market. I am just speculating that Phase One is trying hard to hold on to what market share they have in the aerial imaging market before DJI/Hasselblad steps up their game. I’m honestly not aware if Hasselblad has any industrial products that compete with Phase One in this space... if they don’t I bet they will soon.
They may be the 800lb gorilla, however they have IMO some of the worst marketing, support and after sales support I have ever seen.
DJI's model is allow customers to create a forum and network to themselves. Attempting to ask DJI anything technical, and you can expect nothing clear or straight forward, net the people manning the "tech" lines are totally worthless, past, did you reboot?, did you hit power? did you hear the start up chime? They ship amazing tech out of the box, that is around 98% ready, however you can get into a lot of trouble if you run into that last 2%. It might be a situation of growing faster than expected, but the company needs to do a major internal focus on support to the end user.
There are thankfully, there are hundreds of pilots, who use DJI products, and can take the info stored on the Drone and give you an exact replay of what may have occurred to cause either the crash or failure. The knowledge that these people give for free is a huge asset to DJI. Even providing a map with a very good approximation to where the drone went down. Does DJI provide the same level of help, NO, could they, YES, simply because the data is all there. Instead, they fall back on basic questions which most pilots have advanced past after a few hours of flight. And getting anyone in a level 2 or 3 support is impossible. And also try getting anyone on the phone with the necessary skills to really help, never will happen.
DJI ships all of their consumer drones, without any product data, besides a basic multi lingual sheet that is worthless. Instead you spend hours on line trying to, get their software to work, or even download so that you can get your drone authentication to DJI, as without it you can't fly. Their Assistant 2 software, when it will work, is very good, however it still has trouble with many win10 or even Mac platforms with running. And note, you need the Assistant 2 software to handle more detailed calibrations like the VPS system. There are still issue daily where a new firmware either bricks a drone either controller or aircraft, or where you are locked out since a new NF database is available but you can't get it to upload to your device.
Djigo4 the main app which is used by all Drone pilots (with a dji product) is still buggy, and is not consistent across the iOS, and Android platform. The Crystalsky monitor, which is a keynote product by DJI is by far the most buggy, and it runs a version of the djigo4 app that is by far the least reliable, which has been admitted by DJI creating lockups and video disconnects during flight. It's safe to assume that if and when DJI brings a 50MP or 100MP drone to market it will have a Crystalsky or similar monitor. Hopefully the OS on the monitor will be more reliable that what is the standard today for a monitor that costs 1000.00, more than many of the consumer drones.
So far we are talking about support for hundreds of thousands of consumer drones, across the entire world. If DJI plans to start putting an industrial sensor/camera of 100MP or even 50MP out there (I realize that there are some models already shipping with much larger sensors but only to a very limited market), then I wish them all the best, however they might stop and look at Phase One's model of support, with dealers which carry a very important aspect of the sale to the end user and are the front line of support.
Amazing tech only gets you so far, support after the sale is also very important, something that Phase One, learned early on.
Paul Caldwell