Today Panasonic showed off a new television that is really really skinny (“flat-out skinny” might be more appropriate): the 54-inch TC-P54Z1 is just 1 inch thick, which beats out even the thinnest LCD screens on the market.

The key to making this all work is that Panasonic pulled the tuner out of the TV entirely and moved it into a separate box, which transmits the full, uncompressed 1080p HD signal to the screen using a proprietary format called (cleverly) WirelessHD. This frees up a lot of room on the display, which Panasonic’s taken full advantage of. Funny to think that in an era when Internet is converging like mad with TVs, here’s one TV that’s diverging from itself.

Beyond the wow factor of having a really skinny screen and the ability to hang the thing on your wall relatively easily (it’s 67 pounds, which is pretty good for that size), this new screen is a welcome development for those who have long been waiting for wireless HD to appear. In fact, LG also displayed a wireless HD TV here at CES, and they’ve also joined up with Amimon, Sony, and other companies to create a new format called Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI. But ultra wideband, which once seemed to be the leading candidate for wireless HD, still hasn’t come to fruition.

Panasonic also says that they’ve improved the cells that hold the phosphors in this TV, allowing the screen to be 1/3 brighter while using 1/3 less energy. The TC-P54Z1 is due out this summer, with more models in the super-thin Z1 line to follow.

Update, Friday, January 9: Here’s some video I shot of the TV spinning around so you can really grok the thin-ness. If you buy the Z1, you might as well show it off by putting it on a rotating spit like this:

With cable and broadcast companies switching to HD television, TV makers have gotten a nice bump in sales as viewers upgrade to sets capable of doing the higher resolution video justice. But with the transition to all-digital broadcast television just 40 days away, TV makers are looking for the next big thing that will drive consumers to purchase a brand new TV. And they think they’ve found it — 3D.

Companies like LG and Panasonic are touting plans to develop standards and technology so that you can take advantage of the 3D content currently being made for IMAX 3D, and even watch live 3D TV for, say, sporting events. Panasonic in particular went so far as to have a taped testimonial about how awesome home 3D will be from director James Cameron (who was announced as the director of Titantic, but I prefer to remember him for The Terminator instead. Cameron was in Hollywood working on post-production of his sci-fi epic Avatar, which is being filmed in 3D.)

The only thorn in this rosy picture is that all of the current 3D technologies still require viewers to wear glasses, albeit not the red-and-green cardboard ones of 50′s b-movie fame. Modern glasses use LCD shutters to send different images to each eye, but it still remains an open question as to whether or not people will really want to dig out a set of 3D glasses when it comes time to watch the big game or a movie, either alone or with friends.