Tom Norton

If you want to hide your flat panel, Premier Mounts makes this riser that will conceal it within a custom cabinet, and elevate it when needed. Premier makes the automated riser in various sizes; the custom cabinet work is up to you.

Sony's exhibit at the CEDIA EXPO in September leans heavily on flat panel displays and projectors. But at CES they back off on that emphasis and go for a wider range of audio, video, and other electronic thingys. We're not covering computers here, but I was drawn to the new VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC ($900, February). Especially attractive to long-suffering A/V bloggers suffering under the weight of oversized laptops at trade shows, this tiny compact computer tips the scales at 1.4 lbs. Its 8-inch screen is not for the weak or eye, or the smallish keyboard for the thick of thumb. I found typing on it reasonably easy, though wouldn't want to use it to write the Great American Epic. Wireless everything, of course. Why didn't Steve Jobs and Apple think of this first?

I went to six press conferences today, and every one of them made a big deal about "How green is my company." Whether it was the energy efficiency of the product itself, the manufacturing of same, or how you can dispose of it in ways that are friendly to birds, fish, and other living things (though perhaps not to Chinese villagers*), they were stumbling all over each other to impress the conservation- and ecologically-minded members of the press. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but I couldn't help thinking that the industry has discovered that there may be green in being green.

LED backlighting, Internet-content connectivity, and 240Hz seem to be the watchwords in this year's new HD flat panel sets, if what we've seen so far today, from LG and Toshiba, are representative. Toshiba introduced a whole range of new sets, some non-Regza, some Regza. (Regza, for newbees, is Toshiba's moniker for its premier designs). Some of the upper end models also use a new 14-bit "5G" Resolution + processor said to be capable of making SD sources "feel like" HD. We'll let you know when we see it.