Slightly uncalibrated monitor, how to calibrate properly?

[BD2003]

My sony monitor always seems to be a little off. Its a 19 inch triniton, 400PS. Got it for $160, so even though the colors are a bit off, its still a steal, and I'm not going to be bringing it back.

The monitor give me the option of changing RGB bias (black level), and RGB gain (white level). The factory presets are all over the place, but all of them are a little too red. Although its not just red, a little purplish....

Anyway, so I set the gains all to 100% to make my life a little easier, so I would only have to deal with bias. Good idea or bad idea? Now I'm having trouble finding the exact perfect combination for the bias. Whites are just a little off usually, and the dark corridors in games show an obvious haze.

Eyeing it just isnt going to work, and Ive tried using the color strips on some pages, but like I said...eyeing it just doesnt seem to be working here.

Any objective way to pull it off?

 

[BD2003]

Any ideas?

 

[Oogle]

First of all, I'm not a digital artist or anything. Just getting this info second hand.

Ok, here's the thing. Most of the calibration stuff out there on the net is there for digital artists who want to make their images as accurate as possible on all monitor types. To do this, they calibrate their monitor (and video card) so that it uses a linear gamma scale. After they create their images, they reprocess it for different uncalibrated monitor types (PC, MAC, Terminal, etc.) so that regular users don't have to calibrate their monitors.

So what does this mean? For me, it meant that while my monitor was "calibrated" according to a few websites, the color looked all washed out when I actually played games. I can only assume that the game artists either:

-- Didn't calibrate their monitors properly
-- Assumed that I didn't calibrate mine and reprocessed their game art for a typical PC monitor

In either case, I decided to linearize the gamma on my monitor first (to balance any coloring problems), then adjusted the gamma to a typical uncalibrated PC monitor using my video card. Here's the site that I used to calibrate my monitor

www.aim-dtp.net