Lead Technologies wants to take imaging lead

Lead Technologies (Charlotte, NC, http://www.leadtools.com

), a toolkit vendor that emerged seven years ago to tackle the color side of the imaging world, is quietly making headway in the document imaging community. The company's new LeadTools Version 7 has added more than 200 functions to enable programmers and developers to work with black and white, grayscale and color images for scanning, display, compression, printing, image processing and more.

According to Rich Little, president of the company, Version 7, as well as a forthcoming Version 8, have focused on improving load speed to make the toolkit a viable option for the document imaging market. In Version 8, Lead has optimized the Group4 loading time. Little also noted that Lead Technologies differs from other toolkit vendors such as Diamond Head (Richardson, TX, http://www.dhs.com) and Imagination (Silver Spring, MD, http://www.imagine@imaginationsoftware.com) because it provides an engine rather than an "out-of-the-box" solution. Little feels that those solutions are good for general purposes, but the engine enables particular vertical markets to customize their applications.