I love watching movies on my 2407-HC, 1920x1200 is very spacious for desktop use, and 1080p is awesome when playing Halo 3 :) I think I paid $609 but I'm sure the price has dropped since then - it was definitely worth it. Now if only my computer could handle playing 1080p movies it'd be that...
Probably the best two monitors for price are the LG L246W and Dell 2407WFP-HC. I personally chose the Dell yesterday. I think another good 24" is the BenQ but it's quite a bit more expensive. There are tons of threads about 24" monitors, look around a bit.