Rumor: Panasonic, Yamaha to announce new Blu-ray players at Cedia?

Will the DMP-BD50 be replaced at Cedia?

Cedia is still a couple of weeks away, but a few rumors are starting to trickle out about what will be announced at the show.

According to Blu-ray.com (which is not the official Blu-ray site), both Yamaha and Panasonic will be announcing new Blu-ray players. Yamaha will reportedly be rolling out the S2900, which will be a Profile 1.1 player and looks to only support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in bitstream format. There's no price yet, but we have to imagine it will be relatively affordable given the spec sheet.

For Panasonic, the rumor is that the company will be releasing two new Blu-ray players, the DMP-BD35 and the DMP-BD55. Both of these players will be Profile 2.0-compatible, and the DMP-BD55 is adding 7.1 analog outputs and vibration-reducing isolation feet to its feature set. With that information, we imagine Panasonic will position the DMP-BD35 as the "everyman's Blu-ray player," while the DMP-BD55 will be targeted to home theater enthusiasts willing to pay extra for some additional bells and whistles.

While we're not surprised that Yamaha is looking to get into the Blu-ray game, it is surprising that Panasonic would be rolling out two new players shortly after the release of the Panasonic DMP-BD50. The DMP-BD50 always seems to be in short supply at online retailers, so perhaps these new models will have expanded distribution to ramp up for the holiday season.