In the early days of video art, many artists were involved in the design of hardware specifically for the development of their own creative practices. Although most of these

artists, such as Eric Siegel, Stephen Beck and Nam June Paik [1], were based in the United States, a number of individuals were engaged in comparable activities in Britain during the early 1970s. Richard Monkhouse and Peter Donebauer were among the most significant of these British pioneers in video technology. The author details the development of two early color video synthesizers, the EMS Spectron and the Videokalos Image Processor, and examines their influence on video-based art.