LA Vision Announces Dazzle and Snazzi Personal Video Solutions; The First Products To Let Mainstream Computer Users Capture Snapshots and Video, Send Them Over the Internet, And Use Them In Their Favorite Applications

Business Wire, August 11, 1997

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 11, 1997--LA Vision, the leading provider of standards-based, easy to use, affordable personal video computing products, today announced Dazzle and Snazzi, the first products that allow mainstream Windows 95 users to capture high resolution snapshots and CD quality audio and video and place these pictures and movies in their favorite entertainment and business applications.

Dazzle and Snazzi will allow everyone from home users to office workers to add true digital quality snapshots and video to their favorite Windows 95 applications and create full-screen movies and multimedia projects quickly and easily. They can also record their own CD-ROMs and play them back on their DVD, CD-ROM or video CD players. The company's solutions are based on the MPEG (Motion Pictures Expert Group) standard which has been adopted by industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, DEC, Sony and Hitachi.

Dazzle is an easy to install 5.25" x 3" external adapter that snaps directly onto a computer's external pass-through parallel port in seconds. Snazzi is a PCI add-in card designed to provide more extensive features for power users including advanced editing and video "edit to tape" capabilities. Both products use a friendly five button on-screen software control panel that's easier to use than the typical TV remote control. Users can preview and see recorded images instantly.

The control panel allows users to capture snapshots and full screen video using any video source including a camcorder, VCR, TV, laserdisc or DVD player. Videos are captured in true digital MPEG-1 format with the click of a mouse. MPEG-1 produces the sharpest and clearest images accompanied by superior sound. Snazzi and Dazzle capture full screen video at a "TV quality" 30 frames per second, so what users see on the screen doesn't reflect the typical "herky jerky" frame rates often seen with other products.

Both Snazzi and Dazzle ship with full versions of eight popular software products, including Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Gryphon Morph, MetaCreation Kai's Power Goo, InterActual VideoSaver, Astound Studio M, Cinax iFilmEdit, Stefra Video Control, and VDOnet VDOPhone.

"The mainstream computer user is now moving into a new frontier of video computing," said Sajid Sohail, vice president of research and development for LA Vision. "First there was text-based computing. Then multimedia and interactivity revolutionized the quality and level of visual presentation and exchange available to users. Now Snazzi and Dazzle have added emotion to the way we create and communicate through our computers."

By using Dazzle or Snazzi and these applications, users can manipulate still images, create flyers, cards, and other multimedia projects, "cut and paste" both still and video images, morph still images, and create screen savers using their own stills or movies, or by using the 20 minutes of Star Trek First Contact video included. They can post still images or video onto a web site, attach them to e-mail messages and video conference via the Internet or Intranet. Snazzi and Dazzle captured images can also be incorporated into many other Windows-based applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Finished video and multimedia projects can be stored on hard drives or removable media or sent to others via the Internet. And Snazzi and Dazzle offer the highest video compression rates available -- approximately 200 times -- so recorded images won't consume a large amount of disk space and they can quickly and easily travel over the Internet without degrading image quality or taking a long time to download. For example, Snazzi and Dazzle's MPEG-1 compression allows eight hours of audio or seventy-two minutes of video and audio to be stored on one CD-ROM disc, or ten hours of audio to be recorded on one Zip disc.

Unlike other solutions, people receiving video or stills don't need special software or equipment to view these images on their computers. Microsoft has adopted MPEG-1 as its video standard and enabled playback via Windows 95's DirectShow. Anyone using a Windows 95 PC can receive a still or video image via CD, diskette, or e-mail and can see the still or activate the movie by simply clicking on the image. Macintosh users can receive and play images using QuickTime. Products based on other formats such as MJPEG require that both the sender and the recipient use their non-standard products to view images.

With Dazzle, the user doesn't have to sacrifice a valuable parallel port to realize the benefits of personal video computing. The Dazzle snap-on product includes a pass-through parallel port design so a printer, scanner or other device can be "piggy-backed" on the adapter. Snazzi, in addition to providing all of the features available with Dazzle, allows images to be played back on a VCR, DVD or CD player.

Snazzi ships with two additional software products, Ulead Media Studio 2.5 which allows sophisticated, non-linear editing, and CeQuadrat WinOnCD 3.0 which lets users press their own CD-ROM or VideoCD 2.0 discs for playback on standard VCD/DVD players.