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TV makers eagerly show off their new sets at CES every year, hyping up thinner displays, 240Hz refresh rates, and, of course, "smart" everything. After CES we have to wait months for pricing and sometimes even longer for the TVs themselves to be released. Exact release dates for this year's crop of TVs are still under wraps, but the pricing details have already slipped out.

HDGuru knows what Sony and Sharp will be charging for their upcoming HDTVs and found prices for Panasonic's TVs. Sony's basic 1080p 60Hz sets will be affordable at $400-$800 for 32-inch, 40-inch and 46-inch LCDs. Sharp's focusing on the higher end with edge-lit and fully backlit LED displays that start around the $1000 range.

Here's the problem with digital audio: it always needs electricity to function. Power's off, computer's dead. MP3 player battery's out of juice, the music stops. Where's the old analog reliability? Hanging out in London, it turns out: graphic designer Livia Ritthaler built the ultimate definition of the low-fi record player with a dowel, needle and paper cone. With no power source but a pair of human hands, a few dollars in hobbyist supplies can make music. Not exactly convenient, but it works.

The video below captures Ritthaler's self-turntable playing an audible, though slightly off-speed, piece of music. It's fun to see in action, but probably not as fun as showing the homemade gramophone to a kid and watching them puzzle out how it can produce sound without speakers.

Tesla's out to normalize the electric car--or, at least, introduce a range of vehicles that will eventually appeal to everyone, not just rich business executives looking for a sporty sedan. The Tesla Model X, revealed on Wednesday, takes the shape of a (still very sporty) SUV. It's too elongated and low to the ground to resemble the oversized Ford Explorer--Tesla calls the Model X a blend of the SUV and Minivan, but it's far prettier a combination than it sounds.

The Model X enters production in late 2013, meaning pre-orders put in this very day won't be fulfilled until sometime in 2014. The all-electric SUV will come in 60 and 85 kWh configurations, leaving off the smaller 40 kWh battery configuration available in the cheapest Model S. For Tesla, the Model X represents a step towards profitability: by expanding the technology developed for the Model S, the company can maximize all those (millions) of R&D dollars.

Though solid state drives are all the rage lately, work is still being done to improve the magnetic media used in traditional hard drives, and earlier this week researchers at the University of York announced some impressive results for that cause. Instead of using the magnetic field of a hard drive head to write data, the team created ferrimagnetic nanoislands that can be magnetically altered using laser-generated heat pulses. Not only does this approach use less power, it’s also about 200 times faster, and the nanoislands are so small they can store data more densely than a traditional magnetic platter.

The technology is still quite experimental, however, so don’t expect it to revolutionize standard computer hardware anytime soon. As Extremetech points out, the laser technique is only for quickly writing and storing, not reading, so we don’t know exactly how well those nanoislands move information in the other direction. The research is interesting on its own, however, since previously it was thought that heat could only destroy magnetic charge, not create it.

For the last few weeks, there have been unsubstantiated rumors floating around about Google testing a home entertainment device in the home of employees. Yesterday we got the first solid details on just what Google has been up to, and it’s a curious step for Google. According to the report, Google is working on a device that will stream music throughout a house with wireless speakers. The mysterious device will apparently be sold under the Google brand name.

If memory serves, this sounds an awful lot like Android@Home, and more specifically, like Project Tungsten. Let’s look at what we know, and see if Google actually demoed its next big thing a year ago.

Google Chrome's Instant: now Instant-er, thanks to browser preloading that's been rolled into the stable build of Chrome 17. In early January, Google introduced preloading of autocompleted URLs in Chrome's Omnibox. If you're in the habit of typing in website names instead of relying on the bookmarks toolbar, those sites you trigger with a couple letters--"Gm" for Gmail or "Te" for Tested, for example--will start loading before you press Enter.

Chrome 17 rolled into the stable channel on Wednesday, meaning you could be missing out on speedier page loads this very minute if you haven't restarted the browser in the past 24 hours. Chrome 17 also adds a new security feature that's a bit concerning, given Google's recent privacy policy controversy. To check executable downloads for malware, Chrome will sometimes send the URL of a download--along with the downloader's IP address--to Google's servers in an attempt to check out the file for any malicious content.

In 2011, L.A. Noire's complex face capturing technology looked like the next big thing for video games, or maybe digital entertainment in general. And perhaps it still will be, but it's amazing to see what difference a year makes. It took Team Bondi a rig of 32 cameras and years of work to capture the face of Detective Phelps and the rest of L.A. Noire's cast. Now, look at what a filmmaker and programmer have done with a Kinect and a DSLR.

Working with Carnegie Melon University's Golan Levin, filmmaker Jonathan Minard and artist/programmer James George put together a little project called "virtual cinematograhy." A high resolution image of Levin's face is captured by an SLR and grafted onto a Kinect depth model. Instant 3D model.

Photo-storage startup Snapjoy had a clever idea for competing with Flickr—create a tool that directly imports from Yahoo’s service, allowing users to switch over easily. The idea turned out to be a hit, and in two hours “Flickraft” was used to “rescue” more than 250,000 photos. But then Snapjoy hit a snag—Flickr disabled their API key, effectively blocking the service from harvesting any more images. The knee-jerk reaction would be to assume that Flickr is clamping down on a potential threat by locking up its users' data (or that they simply don’t like being compared to a sinking ship), but there’s a major hole in that theory. Snapjoy acknowledged that the Flickr API key has a limit of 3,600 calls per hour, and that the sudden rush of imports pushed Flickraft over it—in essence, they broke the rules and got cut off accordingly. The team has contacted Flickr over the issue, and hopes to restore their new feature as soon as possible.

The bigger story, though, might be how quickly Flickr users were willing to leave it behind. Let’s look at the criticisms that might have motivated all those imports, and what alternative services are out there for serious photographers.