Tips on calibrating a Dell LCD monitor?

[riddle]

I'm having a terrible time adjusting the colors on Dell LCD monitors that I use with my MacBook Pro. The latest is a Dell 1905FP that is driving me nuts.

I started by following the instructions in Mac OS X's Display Calibrator Assistant (under System Preferences > Displays > Color > Calibrate). The result is that pale grays (eg #eeeeee) are washed out to look completely white (#ffffff).

Here's a test page - I can see the gray vs white distinction clearly on my MacBook Pro, not on the Dell:

http://prentissriddle.com/tmp/contrast-test.html

If I randomly muck with the monitor's hardware color adjustment and/or the options in the Calibrator Assistant I can get #eeeeee to stop looking white, but only by skewing the whole display in the direction of blue or yellow.

Is there a dummy's guide to calibrating cheap monitors on a Mac? Thanks.

 

[riddle]

Update: I tried all the other profiles I had lying around on this machine and I found another LCD profile that I had successfully calibrated to see gray. It sort of works with the Dell 1905FP although it's dim and a little blue-shifted next to my MacBook Pro. I can open up the profile in the ColorSync Utility but the parameters don't mean much to me.

http://prentissriddle.com/tmp/H190L-grey-profile.png

Is this info useful without a PhD in LCD engineering and color perception? Can I use it to tweak the bad 1905FP profile that results when I go through the normal calibration procedure?

 

[riddle]

Another update:

The very kind Fishrrman at Macrumors.com shared a 1905FP profile that is much better than anything I could come up with. On my monitor the result isn't perfect but it's a great improvement. See the thread and download the profile at:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=849380

And over at Macosxhints.com, Trevor helpfully recommended a Spyder 3 Express color calibration tool:

Review: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/profiling/spyder3express_1.html
Froogle search: http://www.google.com/products?q="Spyder+3+Express"&aq=f

Unfortunately, at $89 the Spyder 3 Express would cost nearly as much as this cheap used monitor. Maybe if a couple of buddies wanted to go in on it with me...