Call me a miserable old sod if you like, but I’m really getting the feeling that 2008 is shaping up to be a bit of a bore – at least when it comes to the usually fast-paced world of TV technology.

How come? Because so far this year, the feeling I’ve been left with after every show or brand product demonstration I’ve attended is that nothing really new appears to be happening. Honestly, the only significant ‘movement’ in TV technology that I’ve been able to discern is a concerted effort to make flat TVs a bit slimmer.

Slim TVs hide lack of real innovation

For instance, pretty much all the main brands at the CES in Las Vegas were banging on about how skinny their next generation of TVs were going to be, and JVC recently seemed positively cockahoop to announce at a press product preview that it was going to be the first brand in the UK to launch an ultraslim LCD TV in March.

Well, whoopee-ruddy-do. I mean honestly, does anyone really and truly care whether their next flat TV is a couple of centimetres slimmer than the ones you can buy now? They’ll both hang on the wall just the same, and the amount of living room ‘real estate’ they’ll eat up is in reality so similar as to be more or less negligible.

Doubtless the AV brands’ marketing machines will do their level best to make you believe that you ‘need to be slim to be in’, or some such fashion-based rot.

But as a, um, not especially skinny chap myself, I can tell you now that slimness really isn’t anything special. After all, does a TV’s skinniness improve picture quality? No it does not. Does being ultra-slim automatically make a TV sound better than its ‘fatboy’ rivals? Again, no.

Slim TVs will make certain compromises

In fact, it’s quite possible that the move to ultra-slim could have a negative impact on AV standards. In particular you’ve got to think that the sheer reduction in the space available to put an effective speaker could seriously damage audio performance.

But even with pictures it’s entirely possible that some brands might struggle to get their new skinny LCD panel designs to deliver the same image standards as their more established, chunkier designs.