Hi! Peter, I don't know what is the price of MAX7219 in your country, but in Poland it is horrible expensive. If you buy 1 pcs. (it means if you are buying it to play with) you must to pay more than for 1x16 LCD display! Yes, I know - this is another solution, but in my opinion better is to use i.e. AT89C2051 or similar and make your own LED driver than use this MAX. In the MAX's price you can buy LED displays, microcontroller and some other components. Using kind of Basic (like Bascom evaluation version) you need only 15 minutes to write neccesary software. And that's all. But this is only my opinion.

Jacek