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Technology Stocks : Identix (IDNX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brad greene who wrote (13802)	6/7/1999 12:26:00 PM
From: David	Respond to of 26039

Re: Veridicom using an NEC chip . . . This PR says that Veridicom has developed a silicon sensor product with an onboard CPU. In other words, it is a silicon competitor to the F3 line. Conspicuously missing from the Veridicom PR -- again -- is a price. (And has everyone noticed how the F3 and the other onboard CPU models haven't found a market?) I don't think this product solves Veridicom's problems, which have nothing to do with pixels and resolution and everything to do with susceptibility to static electricity and brittleness. The most recent advances in those two areas have not brought silicon far enough along to compete with optical sensors. So, what you have here is a more expensive and still unseaworthy silicon product. The attack in the PR on optics: "Veridicom's silicon-based, solid-state FPS110 fingerprint sensor eliminates the limitations of optical scanners, including edge distortion, low-image resolution, scratched platens, misaligned optics and bulky size" seems beside the point, because the IDT product clearly has enough resolution to do the job of bio-ID and its next generation scanner will be the size of the silicon scanners, or close enough not to matter. As to the other "limitations," they don't seem to be significant enough to affect sales in the marketplace -- especially when the IDT product is so much cheaper than all other products, both optical and silicon-based. Veridicom is going after non-PC applications with this product. However, they still have to compete on price and physical reliability. This PR doesn't show me they can do that. I remember Veridicom promising to come out with a CPU-onboard silicon reader. We thought that IDX might have been interested in it, but I'm sure they won't be anymore, now that they have acquired IDT. I continue to hold to my thesis that Veridicom is a wannabe with good name recognition and no real hope of catching on. At the rate they are going, the best they can hope for is to be a commodity supplier of hardware after IDX/IDT has grabbed the software market.