
Barco Residential projectors are designed and built in our technology centers in Belgium and Norway. Know-how and craftmanship not only belong to our culture. They're part of our DNA.
How does Barco create CinemaScope?
This is where Barco’s technology comes in: on Barco projectors, the image is scaled diagonally – a uniform process that maintains perfect geometry while utilizing more pixels, almost 2.7 million. The result is an image that fills the entire 5120x2160 space available – real CinemaScope!
We refer to this as ‘cropping’, and there are several features under the cropping function in the menu. The procedure crops off the black bars over and under the image and changes the aspect ratio to CinemaScope. At Barco, we scale an image so that it fills the complete height of 3840x2160 pixels; and then, to maintain the aspect ratio, the image is scaled sideways to fill the complete CinemaScope chip. But we do this as one step, as diagonal stretch.

CinemaScope movie projected by Barco CinemaScope projector on 2.39:1 aspect ratio screen

16:9 program projected by Barco CinemaScope projector on a 2.39:1 aspect ratio screen (black bars left and right)