[unicorn]

adams:

Calibration... a pretty complicated and boring procedure. And it costs money too. Ouch.
I have made color profiles for my scanner, camera, printer and monitors. Tedious. If you don't scan anything and if you can live without a special profile for your camera things are a little easier, but the two most important items to get profiled are still there - the printer(s) and the monitor(s) somehow must get profiled (=calibrated).
For my scanner and printer I use the software Profile Prism from ddisoftware. There are several to choose from but I bought Profile Prism as I had the necessary equipment (a flatbed scanner) to make the profiles. There are no other hardware needed. Another reason for choosing Profile Prism is that the same company makes the strange but indeed very well working software Qimage.
The monitor(s) is/are more tricky. Software only methods are not gonna make it for you. Using Adobe Gamma and similar methods is better than not doing anything. However - you will not get consistent results from time to time and any try to make two different monitors show the samw colors will fail. I finally had to buy a Spyder from Pantone/Colorvision. The same Spyder (a hardware measure tool you connect to the USB port) is used for their two different softwares PhotoCal and Optical. Optical is around $220 (PhotoCal is $150 only) but needed if you want the ability to match two monitors more exact to eachother (plus a lot of other features).
Expensive and not very sexy. But - I now suddenly get consistent colors from my printer. I also see colors in another way now and it took like half a second to see that the new AcDsee 7 needed some settings changed when I tried it the other day here...

Many will not need to calibrate their stuff. And that's good, there are more fun things to do with $250... If you just use a "simple" digicam producing so so jpegs and print them on your old cheap inkjet printer that came bundled with the box for example. Or in a single user system were you learn to adjust the colors to something acceptable and think that just a few prints are just a little out of line (colorwise) - maybe you can skip it.

If you think the colors change in a way you can predict. If you in vain try to get rid of color casts in pictures. If you want to be able to predict the result and if you want to be able to use Proof colors to see what the pics gonna look like... Well - then you have to start calibrate the monitor and printer setup.

hth,