I've spent the past several months trying to get my monitor to look like what's coming out of my printer.
Even when I thought I'd had everything perfectly matched up, I'd still end up with a considerably different result than I was expecting. Eventually I learned to just make an educated guess in my head, because the differences were at least consistent.
As I was digging through my monitor's on-screen settings a couple days ago looking for something completely unrelated, I finally figured out why: the monitor was configured for a different white point than I was trying to achieve. So I changed the color temperature to "User Color" and wham!—my monitor is now a dead-on match to my prints.
The best part is I haven't even spent a cent on calibration hardware, since Apple builds a good-enough monitor profiling utility into Mac OS X.
