Lead Technologies Inc, of Charlotte, North Carolina says that its new hardware for personal computers can compress Megabyte-size image files to about 5Kb at almost real-time rates: the board works with a variety of image file formats and it can compress and decompress 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit Targa and Vista Pixel files; its selectable compression ratios, 5:1 to 255:1, are claimed to support and extend the JPEG standard; the LEAD Compression Card is $2,000 and the LEADView software runs in command-line or TSR modes and incorporates an MS-DOS shell; Windows 3, OS/2 and Unix versions are due out by the end of 1991; the Developers Toolkit includes a C object library for developers to integrate compression and decompression routines.
