Since the company's inception in 1976 as Imapro Inc., Imapro Corporation products have played a major role in the development of the PC-based business and presentation graphics market. In February of 1986, Matrix Instruments Inc. (now known as Miles, Agfa Division), a leading manufacturer of film recorders, acquired Imapro Inc. and its technology. Imapro Corporation was formed when the company's original major shareholders regrouped its staff and facilities, retaining the rights to distribute Matrix film recorders.  Imapro's headquarters, including research and engineering facilities, are located in Ottawa, Canada, with manufacturing facilities located in Charlottetown, Canada. In addition, Imapro UK, located in Hertfordshire, England, provides sales and service support throughout Europe together with Imapro's recently established sales and service centre located in Karlsruhe, Germany. A wholly-owned subsidiary, Imapro Japan, sells Imapro products directly in Japan and has consulted with Canon, Fuji, and other leading Japanese firms.  Imapro's leading products include high-resolution professional color scanners, film recorders, photographic systems, and pre-press systems. Imapro's mandate to ensure superior customer support and satisfaction has enabled the company to maintain a high standard of quality and reliability of all Imapro products. Imapro's research team continues to provide innovative engineering to sustain product leadership.  ACHIEVEMENTS  Imapro's recordof achievements is a result of continued commitment to improve, enhance, and create technologically advanced and reliable products.  1979 FIRST DIGITAL COLOR FILM RECORDING SYSTEM  In 1979, Imapro developed the Color Image Recorder (CIR), the first high-resolution digital color film recording system. Previous film recording technology required mainframe computers and complex, limited-accuracy electron beam recorders.  Made for the Canadian government, the CIR recorded full-color digital images from the LANDSAT earth-resource sensing satellite on photographic film using lasers for the first accurate color film exposure and registration. The CIR recorded 4096x4096 pixels at 24 bits of color/pixel, with a registration of one part per million.  1981 FIRST LOW-COST, HIGH-RESOLUTION FILM RECORDERS  Previous commercially-available film recorders (i.e... Genigraphics and Dicomed) were minicomputer-based and priced at over $250,000, limiting them to service bureaus and large corporations. An outgrowth of the CIR, Imapro's 35mm film recorders made high-resolution (4K, 24 bits/pixel) film recorders affordable for the first time. In 1982, Imapro licensed manufacturing rights for these products to Matrix Instruments Inc., who marketed them worldwide as the highly successful Matrix QCR and PCR film recorders. These state-of-the-art devices launched the in-house film recorder industry and played a key role in the growth of the business and presentation graphics markets. They are the highest-precision office film recorders available for use with the PC-based family and are widely used by business decision-makers at virtually every Fortune 500 company.  1983 FIRST VECTOR-TO-RASTER-PROCESSOR FOR THE PC  Vector-based presentation graphics packages began to appear in the early 1980s, bringing high-resolution, anti-aliased (jaggies-free) graphics to the PC. The Imapro QVP, a card for the PC XT, converted these vectors to run-length-encoded (compressed) raster image that allowed Matrix film recorders to create color slides and prints from these software packages. Now marketed by Matrix as the MVP board, this card is widely used with Zenographics' Mirage software and over 30 other vector-based presentation graphics software packages.  1983 FIRST VECTOR PRESENTATION GRAPHICS LANGUAGE  To interface with vector-based software, Imapro developed SCODL (Scan Conversion Object Description Language), which has become a de facto industry standard for communicating between vector-based software packages and film recorders. SCODL was based on the NAPLS videotex system.  1987 12 MHz VECTOR-TO-RASTER PROCESSOR BOARD FOR THE PC  Imapro introduced the M68000-based MVP+ board, a faster version of the MVP board. The MVP+ offered 1024K of memory, and mapping of Targa and Vista board imagery to the 4K resolution of Matrix film recorders, thermal printers and EGA monitor support.  1987 FIRST PHOTOGRAPHIC-RESOLUTION COLOR SCANNERS  The desktop presentation market had been severely hampered by the limitations of low-cost color scanners. Using remote-sensing image processing techniques, Imapro increased the effective output resolution of a color scanner to fill in detailed pixel data. The result was a photographic-quality, bit-mapped color image with variable-resolution of up to 3000 dpi effective output resolution (depending on original image area) that could be scanned in less than five minutes. This technology effectively converted a low-cost color desktop scanner into a powerful, digital photographic camera for the first time.  1987 FIRST INTEGRATED PRESENTATION GRAPHICS SYSTEM  As an outgrowth of its pioneering developments in color film recording technology, Imapro announced its Photographics 3000 system, the first system to integrate color presentation graphics, color photography, video and text. Imapro marketed this system to value-added resellers as a complete 286/386 PC presentation graphics system, which included a variety of graphics software, an enhanced color scanner. film recorder and optional color printers.  1988 FIRST PC ON-LINE INTERFACE TO SCITEX WORKSTATION  Imapro's Separator System was the first PC-based on-line interface to Scitex workstations, for lower cost design, photo retouching, and page make-up for brochures, advertising and flyers. 1989 PROTOTYPE PREPRESS SYSTEM  Imapro demonstrated its prepress system, reducing the cost of producing color catalogues, brochures and flyers. The Imapro Page Production System is a system offour PC workstations, each of which handles a part of the color process. The Scan Workstation scans images in high resolution; the Author Workstation allows for page layout; the Composer Workstation enhances and composes images; Folio provides quick access color page store and; the Output Workstation produces color or black and white proofs, and CMYK film. This is the first system to allow users to efficiently go from design to film output on one operation system.  1990 SCSI WORKSTATION LINK PRODUCED FOR PREPRESS PRODUCTIONS  Imapro performed live demonstrations at Dusseldorf, West Germany in October during DRUPA 1990 using its Page Production Solution. This technologically advanced system showcased a new feature, the SCSI Link, a fast networking solution connecting the PC workstations and replacing the method of exchanging files by Exabyte videotape. The SCSI Link along with accelerated RGB-CMYK conversion software provides an efficient method to produce full-page color separations.  1990 INTRODUCTION OF THE IMAPRO QCR-ZI 8K FILM RECORDER  Unveiled at the 1990 Photokina show in October at Cologne, West Germany, Imapro announced the new QCR-Zi film recorder capable of outputting image graphics files created on PC-compatible and Macintosh computers at either 4K or the advanced 8K addressable resolution. Six months later, a 35mm version of the QCR-Zi. the QCR-3548 was released.  1990 FIRST PHOTOGRAPHICS 8K SYSTEM  Imapro presented the newest version of the Photographics System at Photokina in Cologne, Germany in October. This enhanced PC or MAC compatible high resolution photographics system highlighted improved quality and processing speed. The Photographics 8K system specializes in scanning, color adjusting, cropping, retouching, restoring and composing images at up to 8K resolution. In addition, the system integrates and processes Imapro's Postscript compatible RIP.  1990 FIRST "TRUE" 1200 DPI SCANNER  As part of its commitment to the ongoing development of flatbed scanners for the professional market, the company introduced the QCS-1260 scanner. This innovative scanner, the first of its kind, scans 600 dpi over the entire 11 "x17" flatbed area and, by mechanically moving the optics within the scanner, scans a "true" 1200 dpi resolution over half of the width (' .8"x17"). This unique feature, along with the optical feedback that is provided to ensure constant color fidelity, ensures that a CCD flatbed scanner is a viable option to traditional, more expensive, drum scanning .  1991 MVP+/20 VECTOR-TO-RASTER PROCESSOR BOARD  Introduced at the National Computer Graphics Association trade show in Chicago, in April, the MVP+/20 is fully compatible with the MVP+. Imapro's newest vector-to-raster processor is the fastest image rasterizer on the market. The improved GPIB performance feature increases the number of images exposed per hour and produces more than 16 million colors.  1991 QCS-2400 SCANNER  Presented at the IFRA trade show in England,the QCS-2400 professional scanner improves on the QCS-1260 by introducing interpolated scanning at up to 1200 dpi over 5.8x17". All features of the QCS-1260 remain in the new QCS-2400. This professional scanner has the increased inflexibility to scan 2.25, 4x5, and 5x7" transparencies and reflective originals at up to 2400 ppi and the unique optical feedback feature ensures consistent color fidelity. 1993 QCS-3200 SCANNER  Announced in June, the QCS-3200 professional scanner scans in a single pass at up to 3200 ppd. The QCS-3200 features all of the QCS-2400's enhanced capabilities plus the unique optical feedback system allowing automatic variation in calibration and superior negative and flesh tone scanning performance.  1993 THE FIRST VARIABLE MEDIA RANGE OF PRODUCTS BASED ON WINDOWS SOFTWARE  The Spring of 1993 saw the introduction of a complete new range of variable media products, the first available based around Microsoft Windows software. Incorporating the new scanner station, WinScan, utilizing the QCS-3200 scanner. Retouching is provided by WinComp with output for film separations on WinSetter or digital film on Winimage.  1994 THE QCR-16K AND QCR-32K FILM RECORDERS  Unveiled at the 1994 Photokina show in September at Cologne, West Germany, Imapro introduced the QCR-16k and QCR-32k film recorders. Capable of producing image graphic files created on PC, Mac and Unix computers at 16k and 32k addressable resolutions, the QCR-16k and QCR-32k feature a new ergonomicfloor design, a built in hard disk and a premium CRT. The unique combination module is available with both models and supports film sizes from 35mm up to 8x10" in either negative or positive film type.