I'm very new to the Autel world. Recently purchased the E2PV2 and also own a DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2 and a Mini 2.
The lossless zoom function drawn me to buy this drone, but I can't see any zoomed in shots that were done in raw.
Even the Mini 2 does this losslessly and I get full res zoomed raw dng files.
I never use this feature but my understanding from other's posts is that the zoom only saves if you are shooting JPGs, RAW is the full sensor so you will only get the original optical focal length when saving as raw. I am not sure how the Mini 2 does it since it has digital zoom as well vs optical zoom, possibly they just crop the raw image to match the digital zoom. Keep in mind that none of this is truly lossless, that's just a marketing term for the uninformed; the reality is that digital zoom is always lossy, only optical zoom is truly lossless.
When they advertise lossless what they mean is that you are not losing sharpness/clarity/detail for the pixels that are captured but what you are losing with digital zoom is the image size/MP count. So if you zoom in by 2x the highest MP image you would have with the
EVO 2 would be 10MP.
All digital zoom is doing is cropping in to a part of the sensor which is why you are able to "losslessly" zoom in farther depending on what video resolution mode you are in (i.e. 4K vs 2.7K, vs 1080P); at the end of the day nothing is free. So with the Autel
EVO 2, when you digitally zoom in you are simply viewing a part of the sensor vs. the whole sensor but when it saves the raw file it is the whole sensor; if you want the same digitally zoomed composition out of the raw file all you need to do is crop in until you have the same composition.
Your final display resolution will determine just how far you can crop before you start to lose resolution. So if for example your final image resolution will be only 5MP then you can crop in up to 4x and still not have lost clarity/sharpness/detail. This is a better approach than the Mini 2 which I assume simply crops the raw beforehand because you can never recover those lost pixels.
The good news is that you did not buy the
EVO 2 due to its 40min advertised flight time, you would be sorely disappointed. It sounds like you are pretty new to the
EVO 2 ecosystem,
this thread may help you understand the pro's/con's vs the DJI ecosystem.
