PS4 Pro will not Support Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray Playback

In a pretty stunning announcement, it seems that Sony has confirmed that the newly announced PS4 Pro will not support Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray playback. So far there has been no official, widespread confirmation, but enough sources who were at the PlayStation Meeting event have been able to ask about it, and the answer has been consistently “no.” Update: the newly released specs also seem to confirm it, simply listing a regular Blu-ray drive.

This is a very odd move on Sony’s part, as they have been a driving force behind the adoption of Blu-ray since the technology debuted. In fact, Sony is essentially the co-inventor of Blu-ray along with Philips. Many still attribute the success of Blu-ray over the HD DVD standard to the former’s inclusion in the PS3 by default. While that raised the price of the console to a staggering $599, it paid off well for Sony, who was able to benefit from much better adoption rates of the technology.

Now with the debut of the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro many expected this upgrade to offer support for the Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray format, which is becoming a standard for many 4K enthusiasts. It seems that Sony didn’t feel that the technology was necessary though. This is all the more surprising given that Microsoft’s recently release Xbox One S does support the Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray format, something that Microsoft was quick to passive aggressively point out on Twitter after the PS4 Pro announcement was made.