There it goes one of Matrox's last markets.

[NocturnDragon]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14133782

Barco Chooses ATI To Power Medical Display Systems For High Quality Radiology Imaging
ATI's FireGL'TM' increases medical imaging performance

"Radiologists now have a new tool to help the diagnosis process thanks to the amazing image quality delivered by ATI and Barco," said Paul Matthijs, Senior Vice President of Medical Imaging Systems, Barco. "With the ever increasing demands placed on physicians, they require resources to help save time while delivering more accurate results. Barco's CORONIS system builds on ATI's industry leading FireGL technology with graphics drivers customized by Barco to provide medical application features, offering the most powerful solution on the market today."

[Mikko]

I don't see any immediate threat towards Matrox because of this particular business deal. According to the press release, this deal will only cover 2MP-3MP display controllers. Besides, Matrox still has plenty of partners, including the display manufacturers and the software developers.

http://www.matroxmed.com/config_table/compat.cfm

http://www.matroxmed.com/sw/home.cfm

[Fluff]

I don't see an immediate threat either. The only threat will be if Matrox aren't as good to deal with as ATI/Nvidia . But I suspect they look after their customers of medical industry and are more responsive, honest and open.

[Dr Mordrid]

Dunno about that.

The big thing in medical imaging is 3D reconstruction of scans and other procedures, and in many applications speed will be a major factor. Many of these will need game level performance to render color high resolution 3D reconstructions at high frame rates, something Matrox is short on.

[rylan]

Fyi this is actually old news. Barco had this info released months ago on their website... not sure why its coming out again.

[VJ]

I don't see this as a problem...

Just wondering: did Barco use Matrox before?


Jörg

[Fluff]

Well when I was in hospital they had a HP xw9300 Workstation with a and a Barco Greyscale TFT afaik Matrox is the only one with 10bit greyscale? For viewing xrays.

Edit looks like Barco had their own controllers.

[rylan]

The 10bit grayscale is a misnomer by the way. The medical grayscale LCD monitors display 8 bits per pixel for 256 simultaneous shades of gray. With the lookup tables using a combination of subpixel and modulation and temporal (framrate) modulation, it allows for a pallet of 3061 shades of gray.
Saying they have 10bit is rather meaningless, because the dvi link is only 8 bits per pixel without using a proprietary format, and windows and the medical viewing applications do not recognize greater than 8 bit per color framebuffers without proprietary hooks written for a specialized API.

And yes, Barco also designs their own graphics controllers.