Might Sony be leaving the 4K Blu-ray market?

That is what’s on a small slice of the Internet’s mind this week, as news broke via Japanese blog (and retailer) Kunkoku earlier this week, that Sony had ended shipments of its last remaining 4K Blu-ray player, the UBP-X700/K.

Sony Japan’s online store further confirms this, listing the player as out of Stock. As far as Sony is concerned, what happens in Japan tends to spread to rest of the world not long after, so while the X700 is still available on both UK and US stores, it’s likely that we’ll see similar notices by the end of the year as stock runs low.

This, along with disc support for the PS5 (for new titles) scheduled to end in January 2028, points in the direction of Sony slowly withdrawing from the optical disc market, a curious turn of events given Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray are the formats Sony helped birthed.

So is the end nigh? I’d be slightly optimistic and say that I’m not so sure.

It’s not unexpected but still disappointing

Sony’s support for its 4K Blu-ray players has been dwindling for several years. It didn’t help that when they first launched, they were somewhat expensive for what they offered – it still baffles me that they never properly implemented auto-switching for Dolby Vision HDR where others did, which seems like such a thing for them to do.

There have been rumours online of a UBP-X800M3 following the discontinuation of the MkII back in early 2025, but as a successor didn’t follow immediately (or even before), this seems less likely than ever with the X700 being pulled from Japan stores.

This reported exit doesn’t leave the 4K player market with no options – Panasonic is still the main producer of 4K discs (surprisingly), and there are models from Magnetar (which we’re hoping to review at some point) as well as Krovatar, whose players have appeared on the likes of Amazon UK and HMV in recent months (and have sold out on HMV); both are part of a wave of Chinese brands entering the 4K market.

All this follows on from Sony entering an agreement with TCL to manufacture and distribute its home cinema wares from mid-2027 onwards – of which I still don’t agree with the notion that TCL has bought Sony’s home cinema division – and which I assumed the 4K players would be a part of, but it seems as if Sony is closing that door with this decision.

We still haven’t had an official line from Sony about the decision, but given that it won’t be at CES in 2027, something has clearly changed within the company about the direction of its  TV and home cinema products, but might it have made the wrong decision, at least regarding its 4K players?

Has Sony exited early?

There’s no doubt streaming had a negative effect on 4K players and optical media at large. At the turn of the millennium, you had a few main sources: broadcast TV through aerial, satellite, cable TV and optical discs. The addition of streaming to that list has split everything wide open – there are multiple apps, multiple devices, multiple subscriptions just to watch something.

But that’s also caused fatigue. With ‘content’ spread across so many apps, there’s a growing number who want to come back to enjoying film and TV in one place.

Who wants to subscribe to multiple services and keep track of all the price increases that streaming is going through? While 4K Blu-ray is more expensive, it does offer the least compression and best quality. There’s been a resurgence in people adopting physical media – we’ve seen that with vinyl, CD, even cassette tapes; people still buy DVDs!

So while people are moved to the convenience of streaming (or some never moved away from DVD), there’s still a market for it, and given Sony’s new Bravia line-up is very much about bringing cinema to the home, it’s an odd flex considering their lack of commitment to 4K players.

Perhaps everyone is buying a Panasonic player or one of the Chinese brands, but according to Amazon UK, 100+ U700 players were bought last month, so there’s still interest in it, and shifting 100+ in a month is nothing to sniff at. Sony may well regret not leaving the door ajar to the 4K player business if this is truly an exit.

It’s an end but not the end of 4K

That said, it shouldn’t all be doom and gloom. 2026 has seen more and more titles hit 4K, from new ones to historic titles. Warner Bros. have been especially good at digging out older titles from its library, with Ben Hur (technically MGM) hitting 4K earlier in the year, and Gone with the Wind coming before the end of 2026.

It’s titles such as these that should have come towards the beginning of the format rather than ten years into it, but restorations/remasters of older prints do take time (and money); but we are seeing more of these titles coming to market, which can only be a good thing.

And it’s not as if Sony has exited the Blu-ray market completely. It still has its DADC processing plant in Austria that manufactures discs, Sony Pictures still releases 4K discs (though fewer this year it feels, at least in the UK) – 4K Blu-ray is still here, and things like this only emphasise that we need to keep talking about it and promoting it.

In a chat with a former Sony employee recently, there was a vibe that Sony does take its time to come to a decision, over-engineers its products, and has a tendency to not quite understand the market it’s in.

Sony is certainly streamlining its operations and focusing on what it does, and the 4K player market is a small slice of what it does, but as this was a format that Sony helped to birth, it feels like it’s a big part of its recent identity, so here’s hoping that it’s not end.