DJI Enterprise prepares a new drone with thermal camera for November 5

A drone with foldable arms and the same set of cameras as the Matrice 5TD. That’s what the 15-second video that DJI Enterprise published on X on October 29 to announce a launch planned for November 5.

Not even the clip, titled Always in Its Elementnor the accompanying registration page mention the name of the product. According to DroneXLthe British distributor Heliguy also does not give more details and limits itself to confirming that a new product is coming from the brand’s professional division.

The first three seconds of the video show a rendered thermal sensor, with the pixel grid visible. The video then focuses on the gimbal, that is, the stabilized support that holds the cameras, mounted under a drone whose arms fold. From there only the motto and logo appear.

The Matrice 5TD cameras, but in a folding drone

On the gimbal you can see a large telephoto lens at the top left, a round thermal lens below, three stacked windows on the right, and a small circular window above them.

As confirmed by the sources consulted, this distribution coincides with that of the Matrix 5TDthe drone that DJI presented on October 14 along with the Dock 4 station and that combines a 1280 x 1024 pixel thermal camera with three 50 MP cameras. However, the 5TD has fixed arms and can only be flown from its base, while the preview model folds them just like the Matrice 4T.

But the arrangement of the cameras is not that of the Matrice 4T, which places the thermal one on the top left and the 168 mm telephoto lens below. Its thermal sensor is 640 x 512 pixels, with a pixel size of 12 μm, and only reaches 1280 x 1024 through Super Resolution mode, that is, as a processed image and not natively.

The 5TD, on the other hand, is an uncooled vanadium oxide microbolometer with 1280 x 1024 native resolution and 8 μm pixels, in addition to a 2560 x 2048 UHR mode. Of course, the video does not clarify which sensor is behind the thermal lens.

If it were the 5TD, it would be the first DJI drone with that integrated thermal format that can be piloted with a controller. Until now, the company has offered it since May 2024 on the Zenmuse H30T, with 12 μm pixels. This is a payload, a separately mountable camera module, compatible with the Matrice 350 RTK and later the Matrice 400.

The name remains unknown, although in the Matrice 4 range DJI used the letter E for the version without a thermal camera and the T for the one that does have one. The timeline looks similar to that of Dock 4: its trailer was released on October 8, and the release came six days later. This time, between the video and the presentation there will be seven.