Sure, you can configure Windows to turn off the display after a period of inactivity, but that's less than ideal: Either the delay is too short, meaning the monitor turns off when you don't want it to, or it's too long to do any good, efficiency-wise.

What I want is a way to quickly turn off the monitor when I get up from my desk and then turn it on again when I return.

Yeah, I know, it's called the Power button. But that doesn't help laptop users. And some monitors take awhile to restart after being powered off.

A British company called VeryPC just unveiled a utility called that combines your Webcam with facial-recognition technology: Whenever you turn away from or leave the computer, the software turns off the display. It turns it back on when your face reappears.

That's kind of cool, but it seems like overkill to me. All I really need is a hotkey that'll turn my display off without actually cutting the power. After all, there are hotkeys for standby and hibernate modes; why not for just the monitor?