Kenn Garroch plugs into an affordable colour monitor

As the number of home computers increases, the market for cheap colour monitors grows. Following JVC's lead with its ECM range, Fidelity has entered with its CM14 14in composite/RGB colour monitor at £228.

The monitor comes packaged in the usual square cardboard box and is easily repacked allowing it to be taken elsewhere if needed. On opening the box, the monitor appears with its silver grey case and inset carrying handle. This is extracted by pressing on one end, causing the other to pop out, allowing the monitor to be lugged about. On the front is a little flap-down hatch, behind which are the controls for volume, brightness, contrast and colour.

The monitor can be used with nearly all of the currently-available home micros, if the connecting lead is correctly wired up. It can also be used with a video recorder to produce quality pictures and sound.

The signail input connector, situated at the back of the monitor, is a fairly unusual SCART connector. This 21-way plug and socket arrangement was originally developed by the French Post Office. But, due to its flexibility, it has been adopted by a number of manufacturers, Fidelity included.

Pre-made cables and plugs are available from a London firm, Tape Recorder Spares. The power switch is located at the bottom right front, with the power indicator just above it.

The connector is a little wobbly but considering that monitors are not generally moved around very much, this shouldn't really matter.

The monitor was tried with a number of machines and gave a reasonable colour picture with most of them. On the BBC, the 80-column high-resolution modes were a little blurred but this was no surprise, since the monitor's video bandwidth is only 12MHz. In the lower resolution modes the picture was fine if a little unstable. This faint flickering became noticeable, out of the corner of the eyem after using the monitor for a while.

The picture as a whole was a little distorted, especially with circles. When playing the kind of game in which the screen scrolls horizontally, this distortion was noticeable as a slight wavering of the lines as they moved across the screen.

When used with the Oric, the picture was very impressive. It was solid and much more stable than on the BBC. The colours were bright and clear and, since the monitor distorted vertically, the Oric's oval circles became a little more true although they were still not quite there.

The picture on the Dragon was not at all good. There was no colour from the composite port and faint lines ran across the border. This may have been due to the cable but, since we used a professional type, it should not have been at fault.

The sound from the Dragon was fed through the CM14's internal speaker at the bottom front left and adjusted with the column control next to the other controls behind the hatch. The sound quality was not particularly good.

With the Commodore 64 and the Vic 20, the picture was again not particularly striking, though it did have colour. Both of these machines showed problems with printing dark coloured characters on a light background. The characters tended to gain horizontal stripes making them unreadable.

The CM14 gave a very good picture when used with the Oric. For some other machines, its flexibility offers advantages over other monitors at similar prices. Its ability to be able to feed more than one type of signal, whether composite or RGB, may not be of much use to single machine owners but those who might like to use it with a video recorder as well as a computer may find it useful.

Pin Number	Function
2,6	Audio in (500mV/1k ohm)
1,3	Audio out (500mV/1k ohm)
4	Audio ground
20	Composite video in (1V/75 ohm neg sync)
19	Composite video out (1V/75 ohn neg sync)
17	Video ground
15	Red in (700mV/75 ohm)
13	Red ground
11	Green in (700mV/75 ohm)
9	Green ground
7	Blue in (700mV/75 ohm)
5	Blue ground
16	Status RGB input 1 to +3V video input
8	Status compositve video input ou = TV +12V (max) = composite video input/output

 
Outer case is classed as pin 21.

Cables are available for:
VCR, Dragon, BBC, Oric, Commodore 64 and Atari