Ah yes, a real photographer, not a vidiot. Pardon my lack of civility, for my name says it all. Like you, I too had a dream of aerial photography once upon a time (decades ago, actually). For three years I fulfilled that dream with a Nikon D800 and a Cinestar8, but it flew away last December never to be seen again, but I digress.
And so on New Years Eve, I came to discover the maker of over-priced children's toys, DJI, a company that seems to care little for, and know even less about, still photography, all the cool kids having abandoned such primitive media long ago. Ah, but there I go again, being carelessly cynical. I'm afraid you must forgive me, for I am a scoundrel and a fool, but in our society only the fool is permitted to speak the truth, so I shall try as best I am able.
What I can tell you about my experience with the X5S used exclusively for still photography is a complex and peculiar story. It's an interesting "camera", for sure, not that I'm certain you can really call it a camera, for it lacks a shutter, and is best thought of as a flying sensor that was designed for video. In fact, should you shoot "raw burst" stills on the SSD, you're really shooting 4:3 5K video at 20fps, with the resulting raws being CineDNG files and not something most programs will recognize as a still image.
With regard to image quality, particularly as it relates to the various M43 lenses one might throw at this thing, I have recently discovered that the "excess baggage" DJI places in their DNG files little flatters whatever glass you happen to place in front of the sensor. I learned this because I, in a fit of madness, became determined to convert the CineDNG frames into proper still DNGs that civilized programs will recognize, and I've very nearly succeeded at this task, although it required far more learning than someone of my feeble mental abilities would have preferred.
The fact (if there is such a thing) is this: if you take a still DNG and process it through Lightroom (or whatever bug-filled bloatware Adopey is peddling to doctors, lawyers and investment bankers these days), the result will be most unimpressive, as you have keenly observed. However, and of quite a shock to me, when you remove most of the "cruft" (profiles, maker notes, etc.) from the DNG and repackage it as linear raw Bayer data along with an absolute minimum of metadata to make it a proper DNG, then you get a completely different result, and one that looks (in my rather jaded opinion) quite a bit better (except for the color balance, which I have yet to figure out).
Shockingly, I discovered that DNG files shot with the Oly 25/1.8, which produce horrid LCA when processed normally, look perfectly fine when releived of their DJI encumbered metadata. The CA simply disappears. How can that be? Can the demons of the X5S truly be exorcised? I fear it is still too early to say for certain, but one must always have faith.
But I've prattled on entirely too much and have said essentially nothing, as is my trademark. And don't get me started on the infamous left-side blur issue, which DJI (and the crowd of internet know-it-alls) denies the existence of. That is a story for another thread and another time, and it is now time for me to go. Toodles.
