It also supported alpha compositing for M32 cards.
Electronic Photography and Imaging Center (EPICenter), co-founded by Carl Calabria, was AT&T’s first intrapreneurial venture. AT&T EPICenter was an internal spin-off of AT&T created to market new technologies AT&T had developed for color frame buffers advanced image processing and editing systems. The Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter, or Targa, add-in board (AIB) was one such classic from the AT&T EPICenter. Truevision went on to pioneer the desktop digital video editing industry with the introduction of the Targa videographics card in 1987 that would run in a PC. In that same year, NewTek announced its Amiga-based video capture board, the Video Toaster, but did not release it until 1990, so Targa truly was the first.
Targa captured continuous-tone images in real time: one-thirtieth of a second per frame. And included gen-lock capability that allowed digitizing video signals from a variety of sources, including video cameras, VCRs, and video disc players. Targa incorporated hardware features, including 2X, 4X and 8X zoom with independent horizontal and vertical panning. Bit plane masking and other programmable options offered flexibility in working with continuous- tone images. The Targa series provided up to 512 × 482-pixel resolution at different color depths. Display device options included analog RGB monitors for Targa models M8, 16, 24 and 32. Composite video monitors for Targa 16. And monochromatic video monitors for Targa 8 and M8. The different features are shown in Table 1.