Sony Japan has marked the UBP-X700/K, its last standalone 4K Blu-ray player, as "Discontinued," so customers in Japan can no longer buy a new one from the company.
The listing change only makes official what shipping data had already suggested. Sony stopped shipping the player in February 2026, which implies it has been selling down existing inventory since then. Sony's only remaining device that plays Blu-ray discs is now the PlayStation 5. The company has also announced that it will end physical game disc production by January 2028, and that has some people wondering whether the PlayStation 6 will ship without an optical drive.
Sony is not the first to step back. LG ended Blu-ray player production in 2024, and the Japanese firms Elecom and Buffalo ended production of Blu-ray drives for PCs in 2026. Buffalo Americas said it is "fully committed to supplying optical drives to the American market" and expects its DVD and Blu-ray drives to stay available "for the near future." Panasonic and other makers still sell players.
The symbolism outweighs the sales impact. Sony was one of the companies that built and backed the Blu-ray standard, so its exit leaves a small market with fewer big names. The pattern also differs from past format changes. VHS and DVD gave way to sharper formats, but Blu-ray is being displaced by streaming, which offers convenience rather than better picture quality. That trade means no physical copy, a point that worries data archivists.
The damage is spreading to the supply chain. Some Hi-Fi player makers have dropped products because optical drive makers stopped producing the components needed to read SACDs, a high-resolution audio disc format. Once the parts vanish, a format can fade even where demand remains. The open question is whether the PS5 era turns out to be the last one in which a mainstream console doubles as the household disc player.