For ink-stained wretches like myself, CES begins a day early. The day before the official opening of CES is Press Day: a parade of scribes and bloggers from one press conference to another. As Christine Persaud notes in her coverage, Press Day was packed, with almost all events being standing-room-only.

Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of each press conference, I'll sketch some of the big themes. Based on Press Day, these have the potential to be the top 10 stories of CES.

Thin is Even More In: Last year, several manufacturers showed ultra-thin flat panels, and that trend is accelerating for 2009. LG announced a 55-inch LCD that's 24.8 mm deep - under an inch.

Samsung's new Luxia series are the thinnest TVs on the market that incorporate a tuner and jack pack: they're just over one inch deep. Samsung will also offer an Ultra-Thin wall mount with a gap of only 0.6", so the TV hangs like a picture. Complementing the new TVs is the wall-mountable, one-inch-deep BDP-4600 Blu-ray player.

Panasonic showed a one-inch-thick plasma that will ship this year, and demonstrated what it says is the world's thinnest PDP: a 37-inch display that's less than 1/3 inch thick!

The Cord is Being Cut: Many of the new super-thin flat panels employ wireless HDMI for connection to the external media receiver/tuner/switcher. That feature is employed on LG's super-thin display. Wireless HDMI is also used to connect Panasonic's one-inch-thick Viera Z1 plasma to its matching set-top box.

LED Gains Ground: The number of LED-backlit LCD TVs is increasing dramatically. LED backlighting allows for dimming of the backlight in dark areas of the picture, for better blacks and shadows, and higher contrast ratios. LG's new super-thin 55-incher has 240 dimming zones and a specified dynamic contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1. Samsung employs mega-contrast LED backlighting and local dimming on its 6000-, 7000- and 8000-series Luxia LCDs. And in May, Toshiba will introduce the 46" and 55" Regza SV670-series models with full-array LED backlighting and local dimming.

LCDs Get Faster: In their high-end models, LCD manufacturers are offering 240 Hz processing to reduce blur even further than models with 120 Hz frame doubling. That feature is offered on premium models from LG, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.

Panasonic, which is firmly in the plasma camp on larger screen sizes, noted that the 600Hz sub-field processing on its Viera plasmas results in full 1080p resolution on scenes with motion, better than the performance of LCDs with 120 Hz frame-doubling.

Black is Just Basic: Manufacturers are moving away from plain-black bezels, not just on premium models, but on mainstream sets as well. Samsung kicked off the trend in 2008 with its Touch of Colour (ToC) flat panels, and in 2009 is adding slimmer, more colourful ToC models. Toshiba is offering LCDs with "deep lagoon design," in which the bezel has a three-dimensional finish with subtle gradation.

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