Oppo Digital may not be the best-known company in the electronics game, but it has made its fair share of great products, like its UDP-205 Ultra HD Blu-ray player and its PM3 headphones, which sound incredible for the price. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that we’ll be seeing more of these in the future; on Monday, April 2, the company announced in a blog post that it plans to gradually stop manufacturing new products.
While it won’t be making new products, Oppo Digital says it will continue to support its existing ones. That said, just how much support your device gets will depend on how recent it is. “Newer products such as the UDP-203 and UDP-205 will likely receive more frequent upgrades while mature products such as the BDP-103 and earlier models will only get firmware upgrades if there are critical fixes,” an FAQ entry at the bottom of the blog post reads.
Though this means that recent buyers of Oppo Digital Blu-ray players don’t need to worry, the company seems to understand why you may not want to hold on to a new product from a company that just announced it’s mostly putting its business to bed. If you purchased your player within the last 30 days, the company will issue a full refund.
A separate company from phone maker Oppo Electronics, though owned by the same parent company, Oppo Digital was founded in 2004. The other Oppo operates independently and isn’t affected in any way by this news. The blog post doesn’t indicate why Oppo Digital is ceasing development of new hardware, though the wording in the post points to financial woes — perhaps not all that surprising for a company best known for making high-end Blu-ray players in a market increasingly reliant on streaming.
“From now on, OPPO Digital will focus our main effort on organizing and ensuring long term support for the existing generation of products,” the post reads. “As such, we will not have the resources to develop and release new generations of products”
Oppo Digital will continue to sell its existing players though its website and authorized retailers, though the company warns that at some point, models will go out of stock. While Oppo Digital hasn’t said so, this likely means that we’ll start to see the company’s products marked down, so if you’re looking to buy a new Blu-ray player, you may want to keep an eye out.
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