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Ahh, I see. 🙂 I should have read your question more carefully! First, I included that grey card because if there's something on screen that people KNOW is neutral, then psychologically, they can make the adjustment and have a better perception of the ink's true color. Or at least, if it doesn't look neutral on their display, they know that they're not getting an accurate representation of the color, either. Most consumer monitors are not factory calibrated to an industry standard, and there's no way to match two monitors' colors from a single point of reference (a neutral grey)... even 24 standard color swatches aren't enough for some people's needs. For photographers and other graphics professionals there's a common way to calibrate monitors so that they all show the same thing. As a photographer, I use a monitor calibrator, which hangs down from the top of my monitor and reads the color from the center of the screen during calibration, and the software that goes along with it adjusts the color output from the GPU to match an industry standard. (I use a Datacolor Spyder Elite 5, which is at least a generation old now, but still works just fine. They used to cost about $100, but prices seem to be going up.) As A Smug Dill mentioned, that does sometimes also require making some adjustments to the brightness and contrast of the monitor (you'll usually get a wizard on screen to help with that) to reach the industry standards, at least to get to the best starting-off point for the software to work from. Most of the work is done by the software, and the calibration process can take a half hour or more, as it changes the colors displayed on the screen, reads them again, makes adjustments, reads again, etc. When you're finished running the calibration software, it will give you a report about how accurate your monitor's color is and how much of the sRGB and/or AdobeRGB gamut it can display, and your graphics card / GPU will load those profile settings every time your computer starts. I calibrate once a month, but there usually isn't much change, if any.

Hey guys and gals, I have been working on an article dealing with an easy way to calibrate monitors, including LCD/TFT screens, for some time now, to be published here. And most of the text is done. If you just gimme a few more weeks, we should be fine. I am in the process of making some set-up screens that can be used universally, because the actual pictures for calibration just use your browser, and nothing else. You may need an additional (tiny) piece of free software, but that is about it. And I am trying to get rid of that too. And make it as foolproof as possible. A calibrated monitor of course means it would be independent of the paper used. Of course, under ideal circumstances you need to calibrate your scanner and printer as well, but for now this will have to do, as it is a spare time activity, besides being present here on FPN . And a grey card, of course, is a great thing to use for calibration of middle grey! HTH, warm regards, Wim