Texas Instruments unveil new .98 DLP Cinema chip

Texas Instruments today unveiled their new .98 DLP Cinema chip.

The announcement coincides with a banner year at the box office for DLP Cinema, marked by 350% growth in deployed DLP Cinema projectors globally and where for the first time ever, the 18 top-grossing films of 2006 were released in digital format and shown on DLP Cinema projectors.

The new .98 DLP Cinema chip offers the same flawless, pristine picture as the original 1.2 DLP Cinema chip introduced in 1999, and is optimised for screen sizes up to 40 feet. The .98 chip is housed in a smaller, more efficient cabinet and outputs up to 18,000 lumens to produce an immersive picture.

It has already been adopted by Barco, one of the leading digital cinema projector manufacturers, and Christie and NEC are expected to adopt the new chip in the near future.

Currently 3,334 screens in commercial theaters worldwide are DLP Cinema equipped and more than 100 films were released in digital format last year. Over the last year, an estimated 35 million moviegoers were introduced to the digital cinema experience featuring DLP Cinema technology.

“We are pleased to introduce the new .98 chip, which will make the conversion to digital cinema easier and more cost-effective for many theatres around the world,” said Nancy Fares, Business Manager for DLP Cinema Products Group. “The strength of DLP Cinema is made clear by the enthusiastic support from the motion picture industry, which released all of their box office blockbusters on the digital format last year.”