Colourful PictureTel Corp, the Peabody, Massachusetts company that won a bigger stake in the business for its principles by demonstrating a working model of its revolutionary video telephone by a tough deadline, has signed Data & Control Equipment Ltd of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire to offer its dial-up video conferencing system in the UK. Called the V-3100, the system comprises a cabinet on castors containing camera, 25 Sony monitor, a built-in sound system with a couple of microphones, a pad which sits on a table and controls the system, and PictureTel’s C-3000 Video Codec coder-decoder, which uses the proprietary Hierarchical Vector Quantisation images compression technique. Average price for such a system is said to be UKP70,000 but the V-3100 retails for UKP50,000.
