The company's first products included DigiView in 1986[4] and DigiPaint, both for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
DigiView was the first full-color video digitizer, and added slow-scan digitizing capabilities to the Amiga platform, allowing images to be imported at low cost, before modern image scanning technology was widely available. Consisting of an input module that allowed the connection of a standard black-and-white video camera (security cameras were popularly used), greyscale images could be captured to the Amiga. With the addition of a color wheel, full color images could be captured by rotating the wheel's red, green, and blue segments in front of the lens and capturing the same image three times, once through each filter. This could be done manually, or with a further motorized accessory. The software combined the color information from the three images into one color image. According to the company, DigiView sold over 100,000 units.[5]
The Amiga hardware included the ability to display 4096 colors on the screen simultaneously, and DigiPaint allowed graphic artists to draw with a variety of tools in that full color space at a time when IBM PCs were typically limited to between 4 and 16 colors. The DigiPaint product offered at release the unique capability of editing and painting on images in the Amiga's unique hold-and-modify high color mode in real time.
The company found widespread fame and started the desktop-video revolution with the release of the Video Toaster, an innovative system for low cost video switching and post production.[5][6] The company was featured in magazine articles in such mainstream publications as Rolling Stone and was featured on the NBC Nightly News. In the early 1990s, a proliferation of video effects in television shows is directly attributable to the Video Toaster's effect of lowering the cost of video-processing hardware from the $100K range into the $4K range.[citation needed] One specific example is the television show Home Improvement, which us