How a 1980s Gadget Presaged a 21st Century Investigation Into Vermeer's 17th ...

If you're interested in art, technology and the intersection thereof, you need to see Tim's Vermeer, the documentary produced by Penn Jillette and directed by Teller. In its own way, it's about a subject near to those gifted illusionists' hearts: magic. In this case, the magic in question is the technique - or perhaps technology - which Johannes Vermeer used in the 17th century to capture color and light with a realism which has dazzled and confounded the world ever sense.

The Tim of the title is Tim Jenison, the co-founder of NewTek, the video technology company which I first became familiar with back in the 1980s, when it made products for Commodore's way-before-its time Amiga computer. Much more recently, Jenison became obsessed with unlocking Vermeer's secrets, began investigating the possibility that the master used lenses to project a real-world image onto his canvas, and...well, I don't want to spoil the story for you. (My colleague Richard Corliss's enthusiastic review has more details.)

Tim's Vermeer briefly mentions NewTek's three best-known products - the Video Toaster and TriCaster, two breakthrough pieces of desktop video production hardware, and LightWave 3D, an animation software package. But as an old Amiga junkie, when I think of NewTek I also think of its first product: Digi-View.

Here's an ad for it, from the November 1989 issue of AmigaWorld magazine:

Digi-View was a device which let you aim a video camera (supplied by you) at an object or photograph. It used a color wheel to photograph multiple images with a total of up to 2.1 million colors, which it then pieced together into a high-quality digital image on the Amiga, in up to - trust me, this was spectacular at the time - 4096 colors. Nothing else at a consumer-friendly price point could compete with it.

The gadget, which debuted in 1986 and sold for $200, was a big hit - maybe the best-known Amiga peripheral of its time. I never owned one, mostly because I couldn't afford a video camera, but it was one of the things which convinced me to buy an Amiga in the first place, in 1987. And if you showed the results to PC owners who didn't have an Amiga, they might not be able to figure out how you captured such a realistic image with a home computer.

It was not, however, the sort of product that would matter forever. Instead, it was an ingenious, elegant stopgap which let you get really nice color images into a PC years before digital photography became a consumer technology.

In other words, Digi-View had something in common with the methods which Vermeer may have used - Tim's Vermeer certainly makes a strong case that the artist was doing something involving technology which allowed him to do things which shouldn't have been possible at the time.

And just to make connect the dots even more evocatively, one of the Vermeer paintings shown and discussed in the movie is 'Girl With a Red Hat.' When I dug through the Internet Archive's collection of Amiga World issues looking for a Digi-View ad, the one I came up with happened to show the device being used to capture a picture of a girl with a red hat. A coincidence, I'm (pretty) positive - but one which made me smile.