Barco Reaches 500th Digital Cinema Projector Milestone

As Worldwide Installations of Barco's 2K D-Cine Projectors Increase, a Major Milestone Has Just Been Achieved With a Multi-Projector Sale of Barco Digital Cinema Products

March 17, 2006

Barco announces that worldwide 2K D-Cine installations have now reached the prestigious "500" mark, with a multi-projector order of D-Cine Premiere DP90 and DP100 projectors. Well in advance of this milestone, Barco has made significant and vital changes to its overall digital cinema operations, with increased staff and factory capacity, plus additional dedicated clean rooms for the critical engine assembly and sealing phases of the D-Cine manufacturing process. The upsurge in manufacturing capacity is further enhanced by the recent opening of Barco's expanded, 40K square feet North American Service Center in Rancho Cordova, California. The center's digital cinema department includes clean rooms for digital cinema optics, re-lamping capabilities, positive-pressure environments for cleaning and repair, plus an extensive stockroom. The department will also be able to offer comprehensive digital cinema training courses. Each Barco D-Cine projector is based on Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema(R) technology. The D-Cine Premiere DP90 is designed for screens up to 15m (49 ft.) wide, while the DP100 is designed for cinema screens up to 20m (65.6 ft.) wide. Both Barco projectors offer 2048 x 1080 native resolution and a 2000:1 contrast ratio -- meeting or exceeding the SMPTE standards for screen brightness. "The number 500 is an important milestone in our digital cinema rollout," said Nico Vernieuwe, Barco's Vice President Digital Cinema, "and it underscores that fact that we're a key player in this market, based on the products' reliability, robust construction, servicability and the superb TI engine. As we increase our market share worldwide, we're gearing up for the next milestone by keeping in sync with our manufacturing and service capabilities, both in Belgium and at our North American headquarters in California." 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(R)). 75 of the world's top projection and display manufacturers design, manufacture and market products based on DLP technology. 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 the best reproduction of fast motion video. Since early 1996, more than 9 million DLP subsystems have been shipped. For more information, please visit http://www.dlp.com Texas Instruments Incorporated provides innovative DSP and Analog technologies to meet our customers' real world signal processing requirements. In addition to Semiconductor, the company's businesses include Sensors & Controls and Educational & Productivity Solutions. 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 http://www.ti.com. DLP and DLP Cinema are registered trademarks of Texas Instruments. About Barco Barco, an international company headquartered in Kortrijk, Belgium, provides visualization and display solutions for professional markets. Barco designs and develops solutions for large screen visualization, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection. Barco is active worldwide and has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco is quoted on Euronext Brussels and is a BEL 20 and a Next 150 company (Euronext: BAR; Reuters: BARBt.BR; Bloomberg: BAR BB). Visit http://www.barco.com for more information.

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