Is Sony’s Burano perfect? No, it isn’t, but then I don’t think there is a “perfect” camera.
Is Burano a “baby Venice”. No, it isn’t, that’s not what it was ever meant to be, for a start it’s around a third of the price of a Venice 2. It has a different sensor and it doesn’t have all the same scan modes and codecs as a Venice. But there are some things that Burano can do that Venice can’t.
Having recently spent almost a week in Norway using Burano for a shoot I have to say that it would have been next to impossible to have shot what I did, at the quality level that I was able to with any other camera.
I was shooting in extremely challenging conditions. Although a lot of the time it was bright and sunny it was also cold (around -12c to -16c) with very high winds, the kind of winds that will shake a camera on a tripod enough to make any attempt at a long shot unusable. However Burano’s built in IBIS stabilisation allowed me to get stable shots even up in the mountains in winds that threatened to rip the door off the car every time I opened it and made standing up challenging.
The weather was highly changeable but often extremely bright. The variable ND filter allowed me to dial in the most appropriate amount of ND quickly and easily and was much easier than dealing with external filters in the strong winds and cold. Being able to just turn a dial and have the right amount of ND allows you to choose the aperture you want. You don’t have to use faster shutter speeds to deal with high light levels. Using a matte box in strong winds tends to make the camera wobble more as a matte-box is about as aerodynamic as a kite.
The AF made getting the focus right very easy. When you are wearing bulky gloves to keep your hands warm operating focus rings is more difficult. When you are trying to work fast to grab a shot in very cold conditions getting the focus right quickly allows you to minimise the amount of time you need to be out in the cold wind.
On the bright sunny days having the viewfinder loupe was a life saver. Trying to see any LCD screen and appreciate the contrast correctly when everything around you is brilliantly bright and white is difficult even with a deep hood and bright screen. But being able to close the loupe and look into the completely shielded viewfinder made it easy. You are viewing the image in a perfectly dark viewfinder, so the contrast you see is correct, the brightness you see is correct. This makes it easy to understand whether your exposure is correct and it’s also easy to see whether the shots are in focus.
Then shooting the Northern Lights at night the 16 bit X-OCN combined with the upper of the dual base ISO’s and S&Q motion allowed me to shoot some pretty faint Aurora’s while retaining the kind of post production flexibility that previously I would only have had by shooting raw still images. Every frame of the video has the quality you would have with a raw photograph. This makes grading and adjustments easy. In addition, by shooting at 8K any noise you do have is much finer and as a result post production noise reduction tends to be much more effective. Shooting the faint Aurora’s that I had on this trip with Burano was easy and I’m really pleased with the outcome.
Another nice thing about Burano is the fast boot up time and relatively low power consumption for a camera that shoots 8K raw. I was using my trusty Paglink 100Wh batteries and a single battery would run the camera for over 2 hours. When shooting timelapse of the Aurora I could stack 2 batteries together confident that this would give me close to 5 hours of continuous shoot time and the ability to hot swap the rearmost battery if necessary to extend this.
What about the rolling shutter? Admittedly, I wasn’t shooting fast action, but I did shoot from a moving ferry boat, did shoot lots of pans across the landscapes, did shoot blowing snow. There was no time where I felt I couldn’t get the shots I wanted to shoot, no time where I was concerened about rolling shutter. I used F5’s and FX9’s (which has a worse rolling shutter) to shoot storms and severe weather, drama and documentaries and it hasn’t been a significant issue. For me Burano reminds me a lot of the F5 that I shot with for so many years, only with better image quality and the added bonus of IBIS and great auto focus.
Sure: I could have used multiple cameras, each optimised for each part of the shoot. But I was travelling on my own and only having to shift one set of gear around, in and out of a different hotel each night, flying with just one camera etc is so much easier than dealing with multiple cameras. This is where Burano excels. Not everything about Burano is perfect, of course less rolling shutter would be nice, but as a package it is a very capable camera and idea for this kind of shoot where you want the best quality you can get but need to work fast, be very mobile,
Next week I head out to Norway for my annual trip in search of the Northern lights. Like last year I will try to stream the Aurora live from Norway. Of course this does depend on the weather and whether the Aurora comes out to play. 
For the sunset shots I made use of the variable ND filter, set to auto to control the exposure. I used the cameras “backlight” auto exposure setting to obtain a bright exposure despite the strong sunlight. These shots were shot using S-Log3 in CineEI and it’s nice that the auto exposure functions work very well in this mode. The main lens used was a Sony 24-240mm f3.5-f6.3 zoom. Not the very greatest of lenses, but for such a zoom range the image quality is pretty decent. I used this lens because the temperature was often below -15c dipping to -34c at times. In addition there was a lot of blowing snow. I don’t like doing a lot of lens swapping in these conditions and the 24-240mm allowed me to take just one lens on most of the trips out and about on the snow scooters or dog sleds.
