NEC's 24-inch EA244WMi is a business-oriented monitor with a thin profile.

CRT stalwarts can still be heard grumbling about superior picture quality and other mostly stale arguments, but the rest of us have long since moved on to slimmer LCD monitors that take up less space and are more power efficient. And if you really want to embrace those benefits, an LCD panel with LED backlighting is the way to go. That's the direction NEC is taking with its 24-inch EA244WMi monitor, the newest addition to its MultiSync EA Series for office warriors.

AU Optronics Corp., LG Display, and Toshiba Corp. have all three agreed to pay a combined $571 million in damages to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging the three were involved in a scheme to artificially drive up the price of liquid crystal display (LCD) panels. That's on top of over $550 million collected from seven other manufacturers earlier in the year, which tallies up to over $1.1 billion in class-action penalties.

Most everyone interested in owning an LCD TV seems to have already went out and purchased one. According to DisplaySearch, worldwide TV shipments tumbled 8 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2012, marking the steepest rate of decline since the second quarter of 2009. More telling, however, is the fact that LCD TVs, which dominate the market with an 84.2 percent share of all types of TVs (well ahead of CRT TVs, which sits in second place with a 9.9 percent share), saw shipments drop by 3 percent year-over-year, and by 33 percent sequentially.

There's a good chance you overpaid for a computer monitor or notebook purchased between 1999 and 2006, the time frame in which several display makers were engaged in a price fixing scandal. All but one pleaded guilty and agreed to pay fines of several million dollars, some of which crept into the hundreds of millions. The lone standout? AU Optronics, which was found guilty by a U.S. court.