The end of an era came via a short release in the Announcements List on Sony’s Japanese website.
Translated to English, the statement from Sony Storage Media Solutions Inc. – addressed to “Dear Valued Customer” – revealed the electronics giant was ceasing production of a slate of products.
“Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products. We will end production of all models of Blu-ray Disc media, MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes as of February 2025. There will be no successor models.
“We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our many customers for their patronage to date.”
Blu-ray Disc media doesn’t refer to movies or games on Blu-ray, but blank recordable media.
Recordable Blu-ray discs are also made by the likes of Verbatim, JVC and Ritek.
MiniDV cassettes are still sold by companies including Maxell, JVC and Panasonic.
“Blu-ray represents the third generation of compact disc (CD) technology, after audio CDs and digital video discs (DVDs),” per Britannica. “In all three technologies, data is stored on a plastic disc 120 millimetres (4.75 inches) in diameter. The data is encoded in pits that form a spiral track on the disc.
“A blue-violet laser, emitting at a wavelength of 405 nanometres, reads the pits. Because the laser used in a Blu-ray is of a shorter wavelength than that used in DVDs (635 or 650 nanometres), the spiral track can be more tightly wound. Thus, the Blu-ray disc can hold more information than the DVD. A single-layer Blu-ray holds 25 gigabytes (GB), and a dual-layer Blu-ray (one with two layers of information, one on top of the other) holds 50 GB. By contrast, a single-layer DVD holds only 4.7 GB.”
