- Buffalo reverses Blu-ray exit decision after securing more components
- Customers face 33-51% price hikes for remaining portable drive stock
- Manufacturing will eventually cease once current component supply runs out
Japanese firm Buffalo has reversed its decision to stop selling Blu-ray drives (via PC Watch), announcing it will continue selling several portable models after securing additional supply of components that were previously unavailable.
This comes after an earlier February 2026 announcement that it would suspend the sale of Blu-ray drives in July 2026 due to component shortages – not a lack of demand.
However, customers are set to pay a premium for Buffalo’s renewed sales due to ongoing global semiconductor shortages, rising material costs and higher overall manufacturing costs.
Limited supply leads to hefty price hikes
For example, the BRXL-PTV6U3 model bundled with writing software sees the biggest increase of 51%, from ¥16,940 ($104) to ¥25,630 ($158). Buffalo’s BRXL-PT6U3 model also sees a 44% price hike, and the BRXL-PTWOU3 increases in cost by 33%.
Additionally, even though the company continues to sell Blu-ray drives at a higher cost to maintain supply for customer demand, production will only continue while newly sourced components last, implying that Buffalo itself is facing major supply struggles.
No final end date has been shared due to the unpredictability of production volumes, shipping volumes and retail inventory levels, but once the parts are no longer available, manufacturing will stop and sales will likely end permanently.
More broadly, it marks ongoing challenges in the industry, with Pioneer confirming it would be withdrawing from the optical disc drive business in 2025. LG also stopped manufacturing new drives, and Sony shipped its final consumer Blu-ray recorders in Japan implying a relatively strong market as other regions dwindled.
Some manufacturers are still clinging on
However, earlier this year Verbatim Japan and I-O Data publicly committed to continuing Blu-ray drive development (via Tom’s Hardware) even after major players exited, arguing that demand remains strong for customers who need long-term offline storage, like photographers and videographers, governments, businesses and archives.
“We have once again recognized that the need to ‘record data I want to keep onto a disc I have on hand [sic]’ continues to genuinely exist,” the two companies said in a joint statement.
However, optical storage does face competition from the generally pricier, but far more convenient rival that is cloud storage. Local storage via SSDs and HDDs is also often favored by many.
Ultimately, despite continued demand for some markets in Japan, likely driven by anime consumption and a relatively strong but declining movie rental business, the Blu-ray market is no longer big enough to guarantee a stable supply of components. With news that Buffalo, too, could soon exit the market after a second wind, it could mark the end of the Blu-ray era.
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