With one eye firmly fixed on the high-tech desk-top publishing industry, the Cambridge-based image processing firm Thermoteknix – known primarily in the US for its infrared image processing equipment – has now launched its laser printer interface board, LasaGram, in the UK. The company claims that by plugging the LazaGram interface card, which combines a gate array with an EPROM memory chip, into a Canon Series 1 or 2 laser printer, the kind of reproduction quality currently confined to text and line graphics can be matched by pictures. Essentially, the LazaGram card modulates the charge on the laser printer beam to 1,500 micro dots per inch, which in turn allows a continuous 64 level grey scale to be achieved: standard 300 dot-per-inch laser printers are unable to produce grey shades below 1/300th of an inch which means that when printed, pictures look blurred. The company also announced a complete image processing system which combines the LazaGram printer interface with a Gram card video digitiser and a graphics card, and allows monochrome images, input from a video camera or video cassette recorder, to be displayed in 128 shades of grey on screen. The image can be enhanced and formatted before printing, or filed on a 150-image- capacity-hard disk. Printing speeds of 10 pictures per minute are seen to be of particular interest for crowd control: by using the LazaGram reporter, troublemakers within football crowds can be pinpointed with a video camera and copies of photographs circulated to police before the end of the match. Prices quoted were UKP795 for the LazaGram interface, UKP2,995 for the LazaGram reporter.