New Chipset to Increase Picture Quality and Contrast Ratios for DLP HDTVs and Projector Products
DLP Products from Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced the introduction of a new chipset, DarkChip™ 4, that furthers the position of DLP as a leader in picture quality and contrast ratio. The new chipset is reported to deliver 30% or more increase in native contrast ratio depending upon the application. All DLP product lines, including DLP HDTVs, DLP 1-chip projectors and DLP 3-chip projectors currently feature products with various chipset iterations of DarkChip technology. The new DarkChip4 will be available in a number of products in 2008.
“Using our current DLP chipsets, our customers have built some of the most competitive Home Theater products in the market, all with excellent picture quality,” said Lars Yoder, vice president, DLP Front Projection Business Unit at TI. “We are proud to introduce the next generation of the DLP chip for future product implementations. It will provide our customers even more flexibility for designing projectors that can meet the needs of a wide range of markets.”
The DarkChip 4 process was first developed for the high brightness and contrast picture quality requirements of the digital cinema industry, of which DLP Cinema is the founder and uncontested world leader. The contrast improvements from DarkChip 4 are achieved by advances in mirror design lithography and other proprietary process changes.
DLP uses a streamlined optical system that efficiently reflects light to the screen, resulting in a stunning viewing experience – crisper whites, ultra-rich blacks and images that “pop” on-screen, making it ideal for unforgettable presentations or movies. DLP-based products are known for their native contrast ratio levels which ultimately sets minimum product contrast ratio level for all scene content. Native contrast ratio also sets the “black level” of the system.
“We are constantly searching and innovating new ways to create simply the best HDTV experience. The better the native contrast performance our mirrors can deliver, the more images will jump of the screen,” said Adam Kunzman, DLP HDTV business manager. “This breakthrough, combined with our other innovations, vibrant colors, high resolution, clarity and digital imaging, gives our customers a competitive and unique advantage in the marketplace”.
About Texas Instruments DLP Products
DLP display technology from Texas Instruments offers clarity down to the most minute detail, delivering pictures rich with color, contrast and brightness to large-screen HDTVs and projectors for business, home, professional venue and digital cinema (DLP Cinema). 50 of the world’s top projection and display manufacturers design, manufacture and market products based on DLP technology. DLP is the only HDTV technology built from a foundation in the digital cinema where it set the industry standard demonstrated by the deployment of DLP Cinema technology in 4,500 theaters worldwide. At the heart of every DLP chip is an array of up to 2.2 million microscopic mirrors which switch incredibly fast to create a high resolution, highly reliable, full color image. DLP technology’s chip architecture and inherent speed advantage provides razor-sharp images and excellent reproduction of fast motion video. Since early 1996, more than 13 million DLP subsystems have been shipped. For more information, please visit www.dlp.com.
About Texas Instruments:
Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and analog technologies to meet our customers’ real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company includes the Educational Technology business. TI is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and has manufacturing, design or sales operations in more than 25 countries.
Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at www.ti.com.
DLP and DLP Cinema are registered trademarks of Texas Instruments.
