For the best picture viewing experience, adjust your monitor's brightness and contrast to see all twenty levels of illumination in the image below.
What about color calibration? Most operating systems, video cards and monitors introduce a color shift that needs to be corrected for faithful image reproduction. Unfortunately, correcting the issue requires a small outlay of funds for additional hardware. Units from X-Rite and Datacolor do a good job. They are sold by B&H Photo, a reliable and reasonably priced source for color calibration hardware starting around $100. B&H is a service oriented business that ships fast. If you do a lot of printing, you may want to consider hardware that can can calibrate your print colors. FACT: You cannot trust your eyes to set color calibration!
Attention Linux Users: You can use calibration hardware from X-Rite and Datacolor although no Linux software is provided. You need an Open Source package called DisplayCAL (formerly dispcalGUI). Software optimized for your distro is very likely to be available via your package manager.(pages open in new browser window)