hmm, I think 4 bucks for a 24X2 is reasonably cheap. The price for a 16X2 LCD as I described above is sold for 18RMB(some $2.3) in China. Yup, ASCII embeded surplus LCD's usually come with std driver&controllers. I do come across some OEM panels from time to time. But I'm not saving a few bucks at the cost of integration.
Things are a little less complicated in U.S, since your language is based on the alphabet. LCD's with ASCII controllers are all you guys need. Whild in here we have a big problem to deal with. There're over 30 thousand Chinese characters, 9 thousand of which are frequently used. So besides those LCD's with ASCII code, a bunch of displays with Chinese characters can also be found in the market. The price is relatively higher, usually over $7. I've personally used a few types for $7.5, $10 and $33. Most of them are 128*64 with 16*16 character size. The $33 one has a more advanced controller made in Taiwan, which can resize the font. Really neat stuff.
Anyway, dot matrix binary libraries are open for download online and we can save such libs in memory chips. There's a simple algorithm to locate a character in this lib and fetch 32 bytes from the address to draw dots on the LCD. I've done such things with a graphical 128*64 COG LCD with 256KByte SPI memory. It was very interesting.