Newsgroups: sci.image.processing
From: paul@pcserv.demon.co.uk (Paul Carpenter)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!hudson.lm.com!news.pop.psu.edu!news.cac.psu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!peernews.demon.co.uk!pcserv.demon.co.uk!paul
Subject: Re: Matrox vs Data Translation - Opinions?
References: <huizen.792336001@appliedmicro.ns.ca> <3hhrgh$5ec@taco.cc.ncsu.edu>
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Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 12:18:29 +0000
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sggoodri@eos.ncsu.edu "Steven Georg Goodridge" writes:
-huizen@appliedmicro.ns.ca (Ron Huizen) writes:
->We need to buy a development system for imageprocessing.  As the
-> intended target platform is PC based, we are looking at Matrox and
-> Data Translation's line of frame...

->Does anyone have any experience and|or opinions on these two
->products, or is there some other system out there we're overlooking?

-Our lab had bad experiences with both vendors. Data Translation's boards
-were over-priced, and when we ordered two of them, they were delivered very
-late. Then the software never came. We called them to complain, and they sent
-us software for the wrong product. Twice.
-Also, the tutorial software didn't work. We junked the system.

Where have I heard that before, I would be interested personally to know
via EMAIL what the board/software/tutorial were and the platform/environment
it was used on. That is for personal use only.

-Matrox has some nice hardware, but they are limited to Windows/DOS (of 
-course so was Data Translation). We use OS/2, but when I called Matrox
-they didn't support ANY 32-bit operating systems.

For some vendors it is difficult to decide which way to go, you have your
choice others may want AIX/AS400 support, or NT or other 32 bit systems.

- They didn't even know what OS/2 was.

That more than likely was a case of one blinkered individual, not the whole 
company.

-It is ironic that both of these vendors built special hardware in order to
-overcome the limits of 16 bit DOS - and this special hardware increases the
-cost of their products. Segmented memory limits the speed at which 
-image pixels in RAM may be addressed (and makes coding more complex) so
-they bypass this DOS limitation by doing everything on the card. But this
-solution is not very flexible.

I agree with the irony, but the basic problem for all vendors is that over
the last year to 18 months there has been a plethora of busses, operating 
environments and vapourware systems. So it has been difficult to choose
which bus to use to get better hardware throughput (PCI/VL local bus
/EISA/PCMCIA I or II or III...) now the world seems to be choosing for PC's
(of the clone variety), to use PCI and PCMCIA for desktops and portable. 
However there is still the case of NT, OS/2 and other environments (Linux 
etc..), all of which create a lot more software writing, testing and COST.

I am not defending these companies as I know what they are like, and their
product design perspective tends to be more their perception of what most
customers need. However my *personal* opinion is that few actually manage to
achieve what most customers actually want. Basically because I used to work for 
one of them.

Remember also that designing and selling frame grabbers is several orders of 
magnitude *smaller* than selling PCs or modems. So the market will be even
more marked in the 'get what you paid for' differences.

-Using OS/2 (or Windows NT), it's easy to process image data in a flat memory
-space...but the hardware folks are still trying to sell their antique wares.

See above..

-What we did may be of interest to you. Multimedia is all the rage, making
-mass-produced video capture cards very cheap. So we bought one for less
-than 10% of the price of the Data Translation card. Multimedia boards 
-range from $200-$1000 for COLOR MOTION CAPTURE!

This is often fine if you only ever capture from a standard video camera, but
the quality of image, colour depth, and other factors depend on your application
as these types of cards are no use to connect to slowscan devices or digital
high speed devices.

You might have been comparing apples and bananas.

-We then used the Multimedia Programmers Toolkit for OS/2 to capture the images
-into RAM, and started writing our own library of image processing functions...

Maybe you have time to write libraries, and few costs associated with your time
others don't and in a lot of establishments the cost of writing libraries can
be 2-4 man weeks, which is a lot more than buying libraries.

-I would suggest you consider this as a viable alternative. It works fine for 
-us! 

The important word is consider as a lot depends on the type of source and other
factors.

BTW your post seemed to be twice as long as it needed to be, is their a problem
with your news poster/feed? (two copies of same post in one post)

-- 
Paul - "Any people you should meet are the products of a deranged imagination"
	(or the figments of some strange marketing dept)
