Arduino: Sending Hex Bytes to Serial Devices

I have been working on a project which involves an Arduino communicating serially with an LCD display device. Through a lot of trial and error, I finally figured out that when you want to send a HEX-encoded byte from the Arduino, you need to use the Serial.write() command rather than the Serial.print() command. The Serial.print() command works find when you are sending an ASCII byte but it will not work when you try to send a HEX byte. The right and wrong ways are below:

//Serial.print('U');  <----right (ASCII)
//Serial.write('U');  <----also fine (ASCII)
//Serial.print(0x55); <----WRONG! (HEX)
//Serial.write(0x55); <----right (HEX)

LINKS:
Similar problem and solution: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/SparkFunSerLCD