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).
