Another thing about color management is it can be done at the driver level (at least with my SIS video card) it uses the Hitachi monitor profiles, slightly customized by me, to provide color management at the system level. The Epson driver uses the Epson profiles in the Epson printer driver. That means that any software I use is color managed. Now if I just had a specific profile for the scanners (I am using sRGB).
Personally I would prefer it to be done by the operating system (eg ColorSync), and supported by the applications and drivers. This has been discussed in detail recently and I won't go any further.
The quality of manufacturer-supplied profiles can vary. A printer profile is only useful for one combination of ink and paper, but I'm sure you know that already. Monitors do vary a bit with age, and manufacturing variations can also cause differences. Oh and a monitor profile is only valid for one colour temperature setting, and one brightness and contrast setting. In my experience the profiles supplied with film scanners seem to be pretty good. You can get software to re-profile them with standard targets (usually IT-8).
With the monitor I found that getting the colour temperature right made the best improvement. The 5500K preset on mine was nowhere near 5500K (I use 6500K now via the R/G/B controls, guided by the Spyder). After that, adjusting the brightness and contrast didn't make a lot of difference to the colour. Certainly not as much as the change it goes through when warming up: when first switched on the shadows take on a slight green hue which disappears as it warms up. However if you're printing then the brightness/contrast controls need to remain unchanged after calibration/profiling.
FYI my working space is Adobe RGB 1998. My lab uses sRGB, and another lab in town uses Kodak ProPhoto RGB. IIRC Adobe RGB is a good match to "expensive" monitors (1998 technology), while sRGB is better suited to cheaper monitors with a smaller gamut (which presumably results in slightly finer colour resolution - some say sRGB gives smoother skin tones).
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
