DELL'S BLUEBERRY FETISH. 4.29.06
I realize that many of you designers out there- even the best of the best- probably only come across a handful of monitors every year. Your personal PC monitor is surely calibrated for optimal color, and while you're aware that uncalibrated monitors can seriously hinder a design, you've probably never placed too much weight on that factor.
Well, as someone who gets his hands on about 50 new PC monitors every year, I feel obliged to raise the flag for a little-known issue: for the past few years, industry-leader Dell has been shipping its monitors with a heavy blue bias. I don't know what it is about their factory or their R&D that makes this seem like a good idea to them, but this year alone I have probably cracked open more than 50 springtime-fresh Dell monitors, and found less than 10% of them to be acceptably calibrated.
I've found that subtle, white-washed site designs like Cameron Moll's, or the DrivePrestige.com gateway page I did recently, can lose a lot of their softness and instead become brash, glaring pages. If you recall the film Traffic, where your eyes were constantly trying to adjust themselves to the yellow and blue tints of the cinematography, it's a lot like that.
I can only deduce that a large minority of the latest PC consumers are seeing the same thing. I sent an email to Dell asking them about this, though I suppose it takes a while for an email to reach India and come back. In the meantime, I would definitely suggest that you play around with blue tint overlays on your web-based designs to get an idea of what a lot of your viewers are seeing.