Have I missed anything? I always do....
I just recalibrated & profiled my monitor last week. I generated profiles for a target gamma of both 1.8 (Mac) and 2.2 (PC), and chose to use 2.2 as my personal preference. BTW when calibrating you can also choose your white point to be whatever you like (I used 6500K).
Brightness and contrast settings are very important as well, and so is the ambient light. And don't trust the colour temperature settings on your monitor to be anywhere near accurate... or anyone else's monitor, for that matter :)
I don't remember why the two systems are different; coming from the PC world I'm used to 2.2 and I used to get very good matching between what I saw on-screen and what I received on paper from the lab (their DLab is Windows-based and uses sRGB). Now the inevitable "but"... my PC had no colour management other than the calibrated monitor, and I haven't actually printed anything from the Mac yet.
Cotty: I don't know of an app to change gamma in OS X - if I want to swap I just change the ColorSync profile in the monitor settings and it switches over immediately to whatever the profile specifies. BTW what are you doing stuck in the dark ages of OS 9?
Under Windows at least, I can say from experience that different applications handle colour differently. Macromedia Dreamweaver (and/or Fireworks) can switch to "Mac Gamma" so you can see how your images will look on a Mac. This is quite a useful feature for web design. Also, I noticed that Photoshop displayed images a little brighter than other apps... maybe it defaulted to Mac gamma on the Windows platform? This was version 5.0LE which had absolutely no colour management settings at all.
- Dave (a Mac snob now... and using OS X makes me a condescending Unix snob too)
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
