EL SEGUNDO, Calif., October 15, 2003 Peerless Systems Corporation, a provider of imaging and networking systems to the digital document markets, announces the QuickPrint Xtreme 1100 ASIC (QPX1100) which has been designed to lower systems costs of high performance, continuous tone (contone) color, multifunction peripheral products (MFPs) and printers. The first MFP integrating the QuickPrint Xtreme 1100 is expected to ship in Peerless’ 4th Quarter that ends on January 31, 2004. “The QuickPrint Xtreme 1100 addresses the growing need for development of low cost, high performance office color products,” said Steve Robinson, vice president of marketing and sales for Peerless. “Over time we believe, the QuickPrint Xtreme family will enable Peerless to deliver high performance support for color tandem MFPs with aggressive price/performance capabilities, especially in Page Description Language (PDL) and Graphics Display Interface (GDI) or host-based environments.” The QPX1100 includes many of the popular features of the QuickPrint ASIC family as well as Peerless’ latest generation of compression and decompression technology.  This new patent pending technology is designed to enable high speed processing of the huge files typical of continuous tone images, while retaining all of the original information.  The lossless quality of the compression method allows for perfect reproduction of the source material, while the small, compressed format enables fast data transfer using inexpensive components. “The QPX1100 turns a general computing platform into a MFP printer and scanner controller, so OEMs can take advantage of industry standards to integrate third party software solutions,” said Robinson.  “In addition, development of this new class of ASIC demonstrates our commitment to growing the office color MFP market. The QPX1100 is one of Peerless’ new products that are points of entry into our Sierra technologies.  Our Sierra project was designed to enable OEMs to deliver MFPs to market at breakthrough price/performance levels.”