The global shortage of solid state memory has claimed its first photographic victim, as Sony has announced that it is suspending fulfillment of all orders for nearly its entire SD and CFexpress memory card product lines.
Sony Japan published the notice on its website today:
Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.
Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.
Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 04, @03:30PM (1 child)
Consumer flash is going away because the supply of fake mostly non-working products will remain the same or even increase while genuine working products disappear.
Certainly the amount of "Sony-branded" flash will never decrease. The ratio might approach 100% fake, of course, especially on platforms like Amazon that have business policies that intentionally encourage fraud.
Rapidly flash will be known as the product that doesn't work and consumers will run away. Rather like IrDA, for example or arguably NFC.
Its possible they won't be running toward anything. If social media is only for the purpose of bots clicking on bots and advertising fraud, that use case might disappear.
(Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Saturday April 04, @04:06PM
The potential secondary problem here is that Sony does Sony, and their higher-end cameras use the smaller type A CFexpress cards are rather than the slightly larger type B ones used by (AFAIK) everyone else, so they supply a good chunk of the memory card for their cameras too. In effect, it's Sony MemoryStick all over again. That's going to present some interesting questions for other manufacturers of the cards who are also struggling to get hold of the chips to put in them; do you even bother making cards specifically for Sony's high-end cameras, or just stick with the more widely-used CFexpress type-B format and SD formats?
For those not aware, CFexpress cards have a LOT higher sustained write speeds than most other card formats (often over 1GByte/s, whereas SD cards tend to top out around 300MByte/s), making them the goto card format if you are serious about shooting high-res video with a higher end camera. If the rest of the market doesn't pick up the slack, this could make models like Sony's A9 much less attractive for those looking to use them for professional video as the card supply dries up, and have secondary effects on Sony's sales and reputation due to both the inevitable fakes and the overall supply issues they probably won't like either.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday April 05, @04:11AM
Didn't know they were still even in the business...