This paper presents a new dead-time compensator for stable and integrating processes when a reduced model of the process is considered. The output is estimated from a discrete time representation of the continuous time model and the tuning of the controllers can be made by any classical control design approach for systems without delay. The internal stability and the robust stability of the proposed scheme is proved and a deep analysis of the disturbance rejection performance is included. As a result, a tuning procedure is derived. An illustrative example shows that the robustness and performance of the proposed scheme are similar or better to those of the more recently proposed dead-time compensators for stable and integrating processes, its capability to reject ramp disturbances being also addressed. The proposed scheme has been tested in a real-time application to control the roll angle in a laboratory prototype of a quad-rotor helicopter. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.