Q. I am going to buy a colour monitor for my Commodore 64. There are four models available locally: Commodore 1701, Fiedlity CM14, Microvitec 452 and Hantarex 900d. The difference in price is almost insignificant, so which will give me the best picture? Will I have compatibility problems if I use a light pen on anything other than the 1701?

Joseph Gatt, Zebbug, Malta

A. It's difficult for us to answer this - and it ought to be easy for you to do so. Just go and have a look. We haven't seen the Hantarex, we've had a Fidelity monitor for some time and it works fine although we have found that it doesn't match the Commodore 1701 for picture quality.

Make sure the Microvitec is compatible with the C64 - most (though not all) Microvitecs use RGB input which the C64 doesn't provide, but if it is compatible then we'd suggest you look closely at the Microvitec and the 1701.

Regarding light pens, you should have no trouble whatsoever, although you'll almost certainly have to fiddle with brightness and contrast controls for perfect results.