Yeah the $40 price probably keeps most hobbyists away from those displays. They really are about the size of a key on your keyboard.

This project is at the prototype stage now so changing pics is no problem. I'll order a few 18F2620 and start looking at the datasheet.

The '4620 has ~3900-ish bytes of ram. You should be able to double-buffer one screen in the ram easily, modify it there, then shift the whole thing out in one shot, if that's the way you want to go.
What command would write the screen into ram, writecode? The digits to be displayed are arrays of bytes? When an update is needed, the corresponding array of byte(s) is written to the specified ram location? I have an understanding of what needs done, now just putting it into code