January 22, 2002, Montreal, Canada - Matrox Imaging today announces an entry-level, ultra low-cost frame grabber for standard analog monochrome or color video acquisition. With its modular and scalable design, along with simple, standard connections, the new Matrox Cronos provides the flexibility required to keep development costs to a minimum.

Applications such as video surveillance will benefit from the scalability of the Cronos design for multiple video inputs. Capable of supporting 16 video inputs, the four-input Cronos base board can easily integrate up to 12 additional multiplexed cameras.

Utilizing a single, highly integrated off-the-shelf chip, this inexpensive solution for the PCI form factor captures from NTSC, PAL, RS-170 and CCIR video sources. Users can connect and switch between four to 16 CVBS, four Y/C or a combination of inputs. Up to 12 TTL auxiliary I/Os and one RS-232/RS-485 configurable serial interface can also be added to the Cronos, which features a TTL trigger input, UltraLock^TM digital locking circuitry, a 32-bit/33 MHz PCI bus master and support for scatter-gather DMA.

Software support is available for Microsoft® Windows® Me, Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP, and consists of Matrox Imaging Library (MIL)/ActiveMIL or MIL-Lite/ActiveMIL-Lite development toolkits for creating custom applications. Matrox Cronos is also supported by Matrox Inspector interactive Windows® imaging software.