I can’t find a website carrying this story without adverts, so forum AUP forbids me posting a link but if you search for something akin to the thread title you should find the same evidence I’ve seen.
Panasonic now seem to be the only major name still making BR/4K players, which saddens me. I’ve got a few hundred BR/4K discs, including some very good remasterings that aren’t available on any platforms I know of. My Sony player is going strong, but I wonder about buying a Sony one as a spare while I still can. I particularly value Sony’s ability to play SACDs as well as 4Ks.
I have/use my Xbox series X to play all my old DVD’s, Blueray discs. I have a few games, but no 4K movies on disc. Seems like a dying format, which is a shame.
JB HiFi, Australia’s largest Home Entertainment retailer have over 1000 4K Movies for sale (I have about 200 of them), so the format is very strong here in Oz as is regular Blu-ray discs and DVD’s.
It is a shame Sony will no longer make players, however, Panasonic players are first class (I have a 9000 and a 820), they dont play SACD or DVD-Audio, but probably not really an issue for the vast majority of people. Better with a dedicated SACD player anyway I would expect, from a sound quality point of view, which is the main point of SACD, although UDP’s are convenient.
After Oppo and Pioneer stopped making players, Panasonic must of benefitted greatly from that and now even more so with Sony pulling out.
Magnetar does some quality players UDP800 MKII Multi-region 4K UHD Blu-ray Player and the UD900 MKII. These are considered to be the OPPO replacements.
This is quite sad news. Sony blu-ray players are/were very good. Think back to the period between the 1960s and the turn of the century, and Sony were the world’s leading consumer electronics/home entertainment company, and were synonymous with innovation and quality.
Now – cameras, games consoles and headphones aside – they don’t seem to be in that space any more. It’s movies and music, publishing, finance, components (apparently they are the world’s largest maker of image sensors) and licensing out the Sony brand for TVs, phones, cheap hifi etc.
They still seem to be very profitable so the management must be doing something right – but I wonder if there is a niche that someone like Panasonic/Technics could move into?
Given that Sony is one of the big movie studios (and the studios hate physical media that you own and can watch any time, they’d much rather work on a pay-per-watch basis), that is more than likely.
For a while Sony’s strategy has been to move away from physical media, they stopped making CD players and now Blu-ray Players and the next Playstation is going to be digital download only.
i paied about 1100 euro for it in '21