Microvitec Plc, of Bradford, West Yorkshire, is determined not to give up on its ailing monitor and terminal business, and has just come out with five new monitors and two new terminals in its Series 9 range. Indeed, despite the company’s drive to exploit its new-found presence in the more fruitful data communications market, Microvitec’s David Muir points out that, in 1990, 80% of revenues were generated by the monitor and terminal division, in which the company continues to place great faith. Microvitec sees its strength as being in the flexibility and customisability of its products, emphasising that the company philosophy is to provide value-added systems, playing off price against performance, instead of sticking to commodity products. Series 9 refers to the electronic chassis of components around which the range of customisable products are built. Two of the new monitors feature Microvitec’s Digital Memory Sizing, DMS, which records manually adjusted frequency settings, in addition to the standard auto-scanning facility. The new monitors include three business models – the Pro-Scan 1550, the VGA-Plus 1440, and the VGA-Plus 1440 Very-Low-Magnetic-Field alternative, and two desktop publishing-computer-aided design level monitors – the AutoScan 2038 and the CAD-Vision 2164. The Pro-Scan 1550, available now for UKP800, operates at frequencies ranging between 30KHz and 50MHz and the 15 screen has a resolution of 1,024 by 768 non-interlaced pixels, which Microvitec is plugging to run power spreadsheets under Windows. The Autoscan 2038, with its 20 screen, is also targeted at document processing, desktop publishing and spreadsheet applications, and analogue and BNC connectors with loop-through enable several monitors to be linked to the same personal computer for training seminars or business presentations. This monitor operates between 15KHz and 38KHz and will cost UKP1,500. The CAD-Vision 2164, confusingly not a member of the Series 9 range and for which a price was not given, is fixed at a frequency of 64KHz and has the largest screen at 21 with a resolution of 1,280 by 1,024. The multi-scanning VGA-Plus 1440, and its low-radiation equivalent, cost UKP450 and UKP500 respectively. The two new Series 9-based terminals are the MCG3200 – a DEC VT320-compatible text terminal, and the MCG4605 high-resolution graphics terminal designed for Uniplex Advanced Graphics and other business graphics applications. The MCG3200, with a 70Hz refresh rate, is priced at UKP900 and features viewdata emulations and a choice of keyboards. It runs any applications written for the Digital Equipment Corp environment, under any flavour of Unix, and using the M2220 driver supplied with Uniplex V6.10 or V7.0, the terminal supports all features of Uniplex in colour, except Advanced Graphics. The MCG4605 graphics terminal, with a display resolution of 640 by 480 and a refresh rate of 72Hz, costs UKP1,500 and is targetted directly at the Uniplex business graphics market, using the M4305 driver supplied with Uniplex. It is compatible with the Tektronix 4105A, with 4207 resolution and performance, and supports DEC VT320 and PC AT/E style keyboards as well as mice. As part of a new customer incentive to ween users onto colour terminals, Microvitec is offering the existing MCG31000 range of colour terminals at a reduction of UKP100, at UKP600. The company does not seem worried about the future of its monitor and terminal business – said the technical marketing manager for terminals, Gareth Parkinson, the generic nature of of the Series 9 enables a time-to-market of only 12 weeks for a number of very different models. As a division, the monitor and terminal operation’s strategy for the future includes increasing the proportion of own-badged products versus OEM shipments. On a larger scale, Microvitec’s objectives as a company include balancing the revenue generation of its three core activities – the Monitor and Terminal business, Vitec Communications, and MV Multimedia.
