At a conference in Cologne, Germany, Sony has announced some big news for the PS3 lineup.  Effective immediately all current models of the PS3 will get a price reduction.  The current 80GB PS3 will be lowered to $299, while the 160GB model will be lowered to $399.  In addition, the current model will be discontinued to make way for the new PS3 model.

Panasonic announced the inclusion of Amazon's Video on Demand service via their new Viera Cast-enabled Blu-ray players.  Panasonic owners will get a software update today loaded via the network connection on their Blu-ray players, similar to the inclusion of Amazon's VOD service on Viera-Cast televisions.

Marantz has added the $599 NR 1501 AV receiver to its lineup.  Also on the slate are two new Profile 2.0 Blu-Ray players.  The NR 1501 features internal decoding of all Blu-Ray sound formats, four HRMI 1.3 inputs and one output, and the ability to transcode analog video to HDMI. 

The first Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 player from Onkyo has been announced.  The DV-BD507 can play all of the features found on a BD-Live disc.  It can internally decode DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD audio formats and it can handle Deep Color and x.v. color as well.

At CEDIA 2009 in September, we will see the first THX-certified Blu-Ray player from Lexicon: the BD-30. Features include a 5 second loading time, BonusVIEW and BD-Live, support for Blu-Ray, DVD, DVD Audio, SACD, CD and files via USB, and RS232. The tentative price point for the BD-30 Blu-ray player is set at $3,499.