Personally I have two 15" LCDs - one's a Dell generic that came with a Dell Dimension and the other is a Viewsonic VG150, which is actually not sold anymore (one of the first LCDs ever made, back in 1999 or so). They both work great IMHO.
Most monitors have no "quality" troubles, the only difference between a "low-quality" and "high-quality" LCD would be stuff like max resolution and response time. You specified 15", that pretty much locks in the resolution at 1024x768. For gaming, 12ms response time is recommended, but you said your friend doesn't want to play games, so pretty much anything should do.
-fs