Sony 80 is Officially Live on Kickstarter

After years of research, collecting, writing, restoring images, and building the ObsoleteSony archive, I’m very happy to finally share the next book with you.

Sony 80: 1946–2026 is a visual history of Sony’s first 80 years, told through 80 products, formats, machines, ideas, and turning points.

This is not meant to be a simple nostalgia book. It is a celebration of how Sony kept changing the shape of technology: radios, televisions, tape recorders, Trinitron, Betamax, Walkman, Handycam, Compact Disc, PlayStation, AIBO, OLED, digital imaging, professional equipment, and the many strange, ambitious, beautiful machines in between.

Sony has never been just one thing. It has been an electronics company, a design company, an entertainment company, a media company, a gaming company, and sometimes a company willing to make objects that looked like they arrived from the future.

That is the story this book is trying to preserve.

What’s inside the book

Sony 80 is built around 80 carefully selected entries, covering the company’s journey from 1946 to 2026. Each entry focuses on one product, format, system, or idea that helps explain a larger moment in Sony history.

The book includes restored advertising imagery, product photography, technical context, and short essays designed to be readable, visual, and collectible. The goal is to make something that works both as a beautiful coffee-table book and as a serious visual reference for Sony fans, collectors, designers, gamers, and anyone interested in consumer electronics history.

This is where years of ObsoleteSony research come together in one physical object.

So much of Sony’s history now lives in scattered places: old magazines, auction listings, broken links, archived press releases, collector forums, manuals, and low-resolution scans.

The internet is useful, but it is also fragile. Images disappear. Context gets lost. Products are remembered as memes instead of as part of a much bigger design and engineering story.…