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If you're doing color sensitive design of any kind, you're killing yourself if you do not have a good hardware ICC color calibration device for both your monitor, color management in photoshop, and color management for print.

I reccomend ColorVision products, you can find reviews out there.

There's a lot that goes with color management, even ambient light is very important, if you expect fine results, but that might not be very important if all you're doing is web design, because the color gamut of sRGB is lacking, and the gamut of available colors via html is horrid--but in a way that's a good thing.

http://www.colorvision.com/profis/profis_view.jsp? id=281

Click on the tab that says "Compare" and you will see that the ColorPLUS package includes the "Spyder" hardware and the other packages include the "Spyder2" hardware.

If you look over the photos you can see the sensors have a different physical designs.

The software package they tested the Spyder with was apparently different than the software in the ColorPLUS bundle but I strongly suspect that the weaknesses are more related to the sensor than the software.

after wading through a couple dozen posts of hopelessly useless pedantic crap, i figured i'd offer a reasonable suggestion: check out the colorvision spyder 2 calibration tool. it's relatively inexpensive, supports windows and mac, and is widely used throughout the industry for photo manipulation and graphic design workstations. combine with a print scanner, and you can get full start-to-finish calibration of your workflow process. here's a review of the previous model.

as some others have noted you can plan on recalibrating at least once a month, particularly with new monitors. if color accuracy is less important than precision (that is, it doesn't matter if the color is correct as long as it looks the same everywhere), make sure you are using the same model of monitor on each desktop as each phosphor combination used in a given model of tube produces a different color gamut. in all events, stay away from lcd - the gamut is crap and they don't hold calibration well.

after wading through a couple dozen posts of hopelessly useless pedantic crap, i figured i'd offer a reasonable suggestion: check out the colorvision spyder 2 calibration tool. it's relatively inexpensive, supports windows and mac, and is widely used throughout the industry for photo manipulation and graphic design workstations. combine with a print scanner, and you can get full start-to-finish calibration of your workflow process. here's a review of the previous model.

as some others have noted you can plan on recalibrating at least once a month, particularly with new monitors. if color accuracy is less important than precision (that is, it doesn't matter if the color is correct as long as it looks the same everywhere), make sure you are using the same model of monitor on each desktop as each phosphor combination used in a given model of tube produces a different color gamut. in all events, stay away from lcd - the gamut is crap and they don't hold calibration well.

Software is nice, but professionals use hardware devices for monitor calibration, such as the ColorVision Spyder.

http://www.colorvision.com/profis/profis_view.jsp? id=341">Spyder2Pro

Yes, you can do it visually, but its not as accurate and a lot more work.

Any computer can have proper color calibration. ColorSync isn't the magic that all make it out to be. If you aren't calibrating your monitor using something like a ColorVision Spyder puck and software then you're never going to have accurate colors, regardless of platform. I'm a Mac user, but I know that Apple's ColorSync ain't gonna save my arse no matter what. Same for a PC.

Without a hardware-based color calibration setup you're just flying blind, regardless of platform.