May 25, 2001, Montreal, Canada - Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Matrox group of companies. Founded in Montreal by engineers Lorne Trottier and Branko Matic, Matrox has since expanded worldwide and established its reputation for creating reliable and cost-effective imaging, graphics and video products.

"We work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment where companies come and go," says Lorne Trottier, president of the Matrox group of companies. "Our success is due to our dedicated employees and their ability to look ahead and develop creative products that surpass the competition in quality, performance and value."

Since the release of its earliest product in 1976, Video RAM, which was the first specialized video display device on the worldwide market, Matrox has led the industry with visionary designs and developments. In 1982, for example, Matrox introduced the Multibus-compatible RGB-GRAPH - a highly successful combination color graphics and video frame grabber card set. This product opened up a wide range of applications for the imaging, graphics and video markets, thus paving the way for future Matrox products.

Subsequently, in 1983, the megapixel display of the GXB 1000 series quadrupled the number of pixels supported by any other graphics card at the time. In 1985, Matrox introduced the industry's first frame grabber for the PC platform, the PIP-512, and in 1986, the revolutionary MVP-AT - the industry's first double-slot, hardware-accelerated image processing board set.

Another major breakthrough for the company came in 1986, when the company won a $72 million contract with the US Army to develop and produce an Electronic Information Delivery System EIDS. EIDS was the world's first multimedia PC with the ability to combine color graphics, video, digital audio and computer data on a single laser disk. This project catapulted Matrox into the multimedia content creation and delivery arena.

Continuing to innovate, Matrox introduced the Image Series modular image processing platform in 1989, setting new industry standards with six custom chips that provided real-time pipelined "neighborhood" processing. In 1993, Matrox went on to pioneer the industry's first hardware-independent software library; real-time image capture directly to PC memory with its popular Matrox Meteor and Pulsar PCI frame grabbers; and, in 1996, released its multiple award-winning line of Genesis vision processors.

Since then, Matrox Imaging has continued to keep on top of market trends, providing such innovative products as the 4Sight family of industrial vision computers as well as frame grabbers for digital interface standards like IEEE-1394 and Camera Link.

"Over the past 25 years, Matrox Imaging has steadily evolved into an over $70 million USD division of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd.," says François Bertrand, Director of Sales and Marketing for Matrox Imaging. "We will continue to provide our customers in the machine vision, image analysis and medical imaging sectors with revolutionary hardware and software products that enable them to develop low-cost imaging applications. Stay tuned!"

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