Sony japan slams brakes on pro memory cards until 2026
Sony Japan just told photographers and video crews to brace for a two-year drought. Every CFexpress and high-speed SD card the company makes vanished from order sheets overnight, with shipments frozen until at least March 2026.
The silicon chokehold tightens
Engineers who swear by the 1.92 TB CEA-G1920T—the card that lets an Alpha 1 rip 8 K at 30 fps for 45 minutes straight—woke up to a blunt notice on Sony’s domestic portal: “We can’t meet demand, so we’re halting demand.” The same fate hits the 480 GB Type B workhorses beloved by Canon R5 C shooters and the entire SF-G and SF-M SD stack that wedding pros slot into dual card bays.
The language is almost surgical. No ETA, no allocation lottery, no wait-list. Sony will “study the supply landscape” and post an update when it feels like it. Translation: even Sony—king of its own supply chain—can’t sweet-talk foundries into more 3-D NAND wafers.
Friday’s PlayStation price hike was only the amuse-bouche. Memory cards are the artery that feeds every mirrorless rig from Hokkaido to Harajuku, and that artery is now clamped. Studios that budgeted card sets per shooter must re-calculate per calendar: two Tokyo Olympics cycles away.
Lo que nadie cuenta es que Sony’s fab partners are reportedly hoarding wafer starts for smartphone makers who pay up front. When the world’s most vertically integrated imaging giant gets pushed to the back of the silicon queue, the shortage isn’t ending next quarter—it’s mutating.
Second-hand prices on Mercari already jumped 40 %. Rental houses are dusting off ancient 128 GB cards like they’re vinyl records. And the next-gen PlayStation? Analysts whispered 2027 yesterday; after today, 2029 looks optimistic.
Sony closed its apology with a bow. Bowing doesn’t shoot 6 K RAW. Creatives now face a choice: downgrade bit rates, swap brands, or stockpile. The last time Sony paused a product line this abruptly it was the lithium-ion battery recall of 2006. That lasted four months. This one is measured in years. Memory, for once, isn’t getting cheaper—it’s simply running out.