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Gold/Mining/Energy : Image Power (IPZ.VSE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary S who wrote (55)	1/19/1998 9:10:00 PM
From: Veteran98	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 383

Who Compresses the Best? The article below was written up in the "Essential Technology Monitor" stockhouse.com Image Power Inc. Symbol: IPZ:VSE www.imagepower.com Share Price: $0.26 Market Cap: $4.5m CDN While it likely will be a decade before everyone in the world can access the Net at high speeds, there still remains incredibly large demand for better compression technologies. The race is on in creating the next generation of still image compression to create a standard for a compression system that will compress several different types of still images (bi-level, gray-level, color) with different characteristics (natural images, cientific, medical, military imagery,text, and rendered graphics) within a unified system. Through the International Standards Organization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC), we can expect that sometime in 1998 we will see a new standard for JPEG compression called JPEG 2000. But, you ask, why is it called JPEG 2000 if it will be defined in 1998? Because, we answer, the demand for better compression has never been higher as more people continue to access the internet at relatively low bandwidth.The plan to develop a new standard of JPEG was planned for the year 2000 but will likely be decided this year and possibly as early as July. What is JPEG and JBIG? The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Joint Bi- Level Image experts Group (JBIG) are joint committees of the ITU (Telecommunications branch, ITU-T) and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG1. They have been meeting for over ten years, initially starting as a working group of SC2, responsible for character coding. JPEG's work started as a compression scheme for photographic reproduction in videotex - perhaps a precursor to the Web. The main criteria was that the algorithm should be capable of real time decoding at ISDN delivery rates using a software solution. JBIG's interest came about because the existing Group 3 and Group 4 facsimile coding algorithms were not as efficient as they might be, particularly for halftoned images - the JBIG standard can be as much as 100% better than these in some circumstances Who is Image Power? Image Power is a provider of powerful still image compression, scanning, organization and archiving desktop applications. Using the company's core technology combined with licensed patents, Image Power produces image compression products for both end user and embedded applications. They have competitive technologies in the JPEG and JBIG category and numerous other applications for wireless compression needs. How do they stack up? For a company trading at a market capitalization of less than $5 million CDN, they stack up tremendously well. In Sydney, Australia in November, 1997, the company's second generation wavelet color compression technology was ranked 9th out of 39 proposals in terms of compression efficiency by the International Standards Organization (ISO) JPEG 2000 standards committee. They beat companies with billion dollar market caps! What will a new JPEG standard mean? For those of you (the majority) who access the Web via an analog modem, it will be very good news. A new JPEG compression standard could greatly decrease the file size of graphics while keeping the same quality. This will mean faster download times.