In the market for a Blu-ray player and can put down a little more than for just a bargain player? Especially if you’re a loyal Marantz enthusiast, you’ll be happy to know you can get some money back for buying one of its Blu-ray players from now until the end of the year.

Marantz is offering a $100 mail-in rebate applicable to the purchase of its high-performance BD7004 ($799) and BD5004 ($549) Blu-ray players, good on purchases made between now and December 31, 2009.

The BD7004 and BD5004 look as good as they perform, with sleek aluminum/reinforced resin front panels and center-mount drawers. The video performance gets a big boost from Anchor Bay VRS Technology video scaling, to bump up those standard DVDs to 1080p as well.

Both units include SD/SDHC card readers for WMA, MP3, and JPEG file support, and the BD7004 plays nicely with DivX and AVCHD files, too.

Lossless audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are decoded onboard, and both have HDMI 1.3a support for 36-bit Deep Color. And with that extra $100 you’ll be able to pick up some cool Blu-ray discs to start demo’ing in your theater.

Arlen Schweiger - Editor of Electronic House Magazine

Arlen writes about home technology installations and product news and reviews for electronichouse.com and Electronic House magazine.