I realize this post is two months old so by now you may have made a decision. The first thing to do, of course, is make sure all monitors are set to 6500K which is the industry standard for those working with color. Then you can tweak gama and so forth using any number of free calibration tools.

A colorometer does come in handy and many of our machines in the office had them. Many photographers have them. I had one I carried (Huey) with my laptop for presentations that only cost $200 or less years ago and was fine for balancing the screen to room light levels and colors. I would not make critical decisions with the settings from it though.

The other issue of course is the type of monitor. You have no doubt noticed color changing somewhat dramatically, especially with tints, when you tilt and LCD monitor? Not much you can do about it.

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I'm aware that you can only achieve so much with a good color profile and that there are other factors as well (ambient lighting etc.). I'll give this Huey device a look. Also, even without a dedicated device, I got good results using the color calibration software that comes with OS X (unfortunately, I didn't find anything similar for Ubuntu and the one in Windows isn't too good, so I'm creating all my color profiles by attaching screens to my Macbook).