LAKEWOOD, Colo., July 26 -- Soft Imaging System Corp. has come out with a camera whose compact and elegant housing hides the latest in camera technology. The camera has a Peltier cooled CCD chip with 2048 x 1536 pixels and 3 x 12-bit resolution, and a read-out with the new digital correlated double sampling technique. The result is a high quality image rich in detail and contrast, with an extremely good signal-to-noise ratio, that can be transferred to the PC using a FireWire (IEEE 1394) connection. Thanks to the FireWire technology, a separate frame grabber card is no longer required. A fast search mode with a frame rate of 25 images per second allows a comfortable and stress-free working with the camera directly on the PC screen. The search mode utilizes the three-fold true-color binning of the ColorView II, which provides the full field of view in true color at a resolution of 682 x 512 pixels. A focus mode is also available, which uses a two-fold true color binning for a resolution of 1024 x 768 at 16 frames per second and full field of view. Even at the highest resolution, the camera allows a frame rate of 5 images per second. This new camera has application in both bio-medical and materials science.