Sony japan pulls memory cards off shelves until 2026, chips vanish faster than stock
Sony’s Japanese storefronts have stopped taking orders for every professional CFexpress and SD card it makes. The freeze runs until March 2026, the company admitted late Tuesday, turning a quiet shortage into an outright blackout.
The fabs can’t keep up, so photographers pay the price
Engineers who shoot 8K RAW on Sony’s own α1 or FX6 now face a secondary market where a 192 GB CFexpress Type A CEA-G1920T already trades above ¥90,000—double the list price. Sony’s statement blames “ongoing semiconductor supply constraints,” a phrase that has lost its ability to shock yet still decides who can work and who must wait.
The casualty list is exhaustive: Type A cards from 240 GB to 1.92 TB, Type B cards at 240 GB and 480 GB, plus the entire SF-G and SF-M SDXC roster that field reporters slide into every second mirrorless body. Sony will honor wholesaler contracts already booked, but new retail inventory dries up in 48 hours across Rakuten, Yodobashi and Amazon Japan.
Playstation price hike was only the opening scene
Last Friday the same Tokyo division raised the domestic sticker on PlayStation 5, PS5 Pro and PlayStation Portal, citing “global inflationary pressure.” The console bump felt routine; memory cards are surgical. Without them, 4K slow-motion capture on assignment becomes a dice roll of buffer capacity and hope.
Sources inside Sony’s Nagano semiconductor plant tell TechBloom that wafer starts for the company’s bespoke flash controllers have been diverted to image-sensor lines serving Apple’s next iPhone cycle. Translation: the same silicon that keeps photos alive is being rationed to keep smartphone profits alive.
Sony insists the halt is “temporary,” yet refuses to name a restart date beyond a vague promise to “review supply conditions.” The last time the firm used identical language, in 2021, its ZV-E10 camera remained back-ordered for fourteen months.
Resellers smell blood
Yahoo Auctions Japan moved 600 Sony SD cards in the 24 hours after the announcement, median markup 134 %. Professional shooters are stacking last-gen cards like film rolls in 1999, while firmware hacks that slow down bit-rates circulate in closed Discord servers. The shortage is no longer a component crisis; it is already a creative one.
Sony’s imaging division booked ¥356 billion in revenue last fiscal year. Memory cards represent barely 4 % of that figure, but they sit at the chokepoint between every shutter click and the client who pays the invoice. Lose the card, lose the workflow, lose the client.
The company ends its communiqué with the standard Japanese bow: “We apologize for any inconvenience.” Photographers translating the phrase read it as: bring cash, patience, or a different brand. By 2026 the cameras they use may already demand PCIe 5.0 slots Sony has not yet committed to fill. The cycle never simply restarts; it moves on, and the ones left empty-handed become the footnote.