Samsung to stop making Blu-ray players

Samsung says it won't produce any new 1080p or 4K Blu-ray players for the US market.

Ty Pendlebury Editor

Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.

Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials

Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.

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Ty Pendlebury

Feb. 15, 2019 12:00 p.m. PT

The Samsung K8500 may be one of the last Samsung Blu-ray players
Sarah Tew/CNET

Samsung appears to be following the lead of Oppo and exiting the Blu-ray player market in the US.

Samsung has elaborated on an earlier report that it was no longer making 4K players and has confirmed that it will also halt production on new 1080p models.

"Samsung will no longer introduce new Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray player models in the US market," a Samsung spokesperson told CNET.

Samsung launched its last 4K players in 2017 and didn't add any new models to its lineup in 2018. A high-end 4K player for 2019 along the lines of its UBD-M9500 was in the works, a Forbes report says, but has now been scrapped.

One of the reasons for pulling out could be that the existing 4K players' format support has lagged behind the rest of the industry. For example, instead of supporting Dolby Vision, Samsung created its own version of HDR10, called HDR10+, which was designed for use in streaming and physical media.

Competitor Oppo was the first company to support both HDR10 and Dolby Vision but announced it was ending production of its 4K Blu-ray players in April 2018.

Meanwhile, Sony announced the M2 player at CES 2019 with support for Dolby Vision, and Panasonic recently released the high-end DP-UB9000 player in Europe and Australia.

Updated, 5:36pm ET: Added comment from Samsung including the information regarding 1080p players..