Japanese PC peripherals and accessories stalwart Elecom has announced that it is pulling out of the Blu-ray drive market. The Osaka-based outfit, established in 1986, has pulled the plug on nine drives. That’s the entirety of its external USB-attached drive portfolio. In an official notice of discontinuation (machine translation), the firm apologized for any inconvenience its decision would cause and said the drives would stop being sold on June 30, 2026, depending on stock levels.
Removing these nine drives from retail could leave quite a vacuum. Elecom’s range was an example of micro-segmentation, with these nine drives differing in various ways with permutations of USB-A, and/or USB-C interfaces, colors, M-Disc support, software package, and it even had a model specifically for Macs. It is rather drastic to cancel them all and not leave at least one of the more popular options available. At least some of the drives appear to have been branded as ‘Logitec’ (not Logitech, which is known as Logicool in Japan).
Another one bites the dust
In recent months, we have gotten the impression that firms have been dropping established Blu-ray hardware products like hot potatoes. LG and Sony have publicly announced their exit from various Blu-ray player and recorder segments. The latter also stopped recordable Blu-ray media production – an important factor for the broader optical drive industry.
In a move rather similar to Elecom’s, Japan-based peripherals maker Buffalo also recently announced it was withdrawing from the Blu-ray disk drive market. However, the firm was quick to follow up with a statement to Tom’s Hardware, reassuring the readership that it was “fully committed to supplying optical drives to the American market, and our DVD/Blu-ray drive products are anticipated to remain available for the near future.” We note that Buffalo still has a trio of external Blu-ray drives available on Amazon.com starting from $99.
Blu-ray optical drives entered the consumer sphere at CES 2006, so has been around for over two decades. In its early days, it successfully saw off the HD DVD format, and it remains the format of choice for movie and TV buffs who want to keep their favorites in a physical library, able to dip in and enjoy the ultimate quality whenever they are in the mood.
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