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Portrait Displays Company Background

Company Background

Originally founded in 1993 as a "Technology spin-off" from Radius, Inc., Portrait Displays is a leading provider of software applications for display technologies. Portrait's expanded product line includes Pivot® rotational software as well as the newly released Liquid ViewTM and Liquid SurfTM. The Liquid family of products is focused on enhancing the users viewing and utility experience on all display mediums.

Portrait is the sole developer and owner of Pivot® Technology software. Pivot® enables LCD, Plasma and CRT monitors to be rotated between landscape (horizontal view) and portrait (vertical full page view) while dynamically arranging the contents of the screen to fully utilize the selected display orientation.

The company's core business is based on licensing its intellectual property to numerous leading panel and monitor manufacturers worldwide. The Pivot® technology is used in many LCD monitors to provide a unique productive feature to this growing market segment. Currently, over 25% of the LCDs sold in the US have rotating capabilities. These displays must be shipped with the company's software in order to utilize the rotating feature. In addition to the computer industry, several vertical applications require the display to be rotated from its traditional landscape view. In some cases the screen is rotated 1800 or upside down. The Pivot® software can be customized to rotate in any direction: 900, 1800, and 2700, per the customer's requirement. Various vertical applications include: kiosks, touch screens, voting machines, cockpit display devices, web pads, tablet PC, and hand held computing devices.

Liquid ViewTM version 2.0 was recently released as a major upgrade building on its first year of success. Liquid ViewTM addresses the issue of legibility as the display's resolution increases but the glass remains the same physical size. Notebook and monitor manufacturers have a strong desire to improve and differentiate their products by increasing the resolution of the display without increasing the display's physical screen size. The increased resolution leads to improved image quality for both documents and images. However, it has one big disadvantage; as the resolution increases the pixels per inch (PPI) also increase. The overall affect is that the Windows operating system (OS) and the application user interface (UI) shrink. The icons, text messages, menus, scroll bars, fonts and graphic elements that make up the desktop become difficult to read and navigate. In addition the mouse appears sluggish due to traversing many more pixels per inch. Liquid ViewTM globally solves these issues by scaling the User Interface without altering the resolution of the display.

Liquid Surf™ is our latest software utility, released in the first quarter of 2003. Liquid Surf is a Microsoft® Internet Explorer browser toolbar that includes many functions allowing for "on-the-fly" viewing and productivity enhancements. Liquid Surf™ is addressing user challenges related to viewing content that is either too small or screen space, which goes unused. The features in the product will tremendously improve one's web surfing experience.

At Display Search, Portrait will debut our latest product line, Display Tune™. Display Tune technology provides users with the easiest and most powerful set of tools to manage their monitor. Come and see us in our booth for a demonstration.

The company is engaged in designing other solutions for LCD, CRT and Plasma displays. As new leading edge display technologies enter the market, hardware issues arise that require display engineering expertise. The company has the engineering experience and resources to solve these issues diversifying from one product to a multitude of display solutions.