Michael Ahlén
← Craft

Craft

Sony BURANO 4.0 in May 2027. What the fuck is the firmware team doing?

Michael Ahlén2 min read

Sony just put Version 4.0 on the roadmap: available from May 2027 or later.

Three things.

  • X-OCN ST
  • Multi-cam control with MSU and CNA-2
  • OpenTrackIO

BURANO already does X-OCN LT. ST is the mid-tier flavour Venice has had for years. XT stays on Venice 2 and OpenTrackIO and MCS matter if you live in multi-cam or virtual production. They are not “we finally finished the camera.”

3.0 was released in May 2026. Anamorphic 5.8K 6:5, S35 3.8K at 120, X-OCN on the 1.9K 240 mode, better peaking, the live-prod bits. A lot of what should have been closer to launch firmware. That one took forever. Now the “minor” follow-up — mostly to bring recording and control in line with cheaper cameras in the family — is nine months from today’s announcement. A year after 3.0.

Sony is good at publishing a roadmap and then shipping inside the window. Credit where it’s due. The problem is the window. Nine months for a codec variant that already exists in the lineup and two control protocols is not careful engineering. It’s 2014 process on a 2026 body.

I even asked Claude if we could hack the Sony A1 II firmware and improve it ourselves. Turns out that’s quite hard 2026. Locked down, signed, not a weekend thing. OK. I’m not looking to brick cameras in the field.

But I am quite confident about this: if Sony Japan handed me the source code of the current firmware, I could do magic in the next three months. Not because I’m special. Because the features they’re calendaring for May 2027 are not moon-landing work. They’re known codecs, known protocols, and a development machine that still moves like a committee, and what i learned the hard way, to build for yourself is easy, because i know what I want, even when my wife comes and request an App its 100x harder for me to develop it, because I cant see it fully in my mind, i know fully understand the bottle neck of user versus user, it's real.

I don’t need them to ship untested garbage. Validation is real. “Every card, LUT, SDI box and MSU combination” is real. Say that’s the bottleneck if it is. If the bottleneck is ticket queues and too few people, say that instead. From the outside it looks like nobody is allowed to move until the next fiscal slide is approved, japan style of company rules.

Sarcastic the public-service announcement for Sony Japan: give every person on that firmware team a Claude Max and let them use the new Fable 5.1 and I'm sure the firmware can be released within 4 weeks (if I did it in 1 week)

BURANO is a very capable camera. 3.0 made it much better. 4.0 will make it slightly more useful. None of that is meaningless work. The calendar is the story.

May 2027. Circle it. Or don’t. By then this will either look petty or look exactly like every other Sony cinema firmware thread from the last ten years.