Question: I've read around a lot on the whole color-management thing. Gamut. Calibration...

**How can I know what my monitor is capable of?**

At home I have a Samsung 220wm and at work I have some older IBM ThinkVisions. I'm assuming that these are not wide-gamut monitors. How do I know if I care? Can I use the calibration profile to tell me? When I view some of the calibration images out there, I can see the greyscale steps just fine. The color transitions look pretty even.

For me the whole point is to help me get prints that look good. Definitely not high end stuff; just shots to hang on my wall.

As a related question, I've seen videos and screenshots that visualize the color-spaces in a 3d graph. **Is there such a visualizer that runs on win7?** If I understand everything correctly, I could view the profile of my monitor together with that of the local costco printers to see how I'm doing. Does this make sense?

Answer: 
Microsoft had quite a nice Color [control panel applet](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=1E33DCA0-7721-43CA-9174-7F8D429FBB9E&displaylang=en) for Windows XP (that did include a 3D gamut display). With Windows Vista, however, they introduced the "Windows Color System", and I'm pretty sure the XP applet won't work with any of the newer OSes (which really is too bad. Although Vista/7 now include a "color" applet out of the box, at least IMO, it's nowhere close to as good of a design (color management presented as a column of text instead of anything remotely visual? Did anybody really think at all about what sort of people would care about this?)

There are definitely tools that can show a 3D graph of a profile (or more than one profile at a time, for comparison) such as [Chromix ColorThink](http://www2.chromix.com/colorthink/std/std_3D?-session=SessID:D1F869EC0514b19B66rQI11A7A75). There's also [GamutVision](http://www.gamutvision.com/), but AFAIK it hasn't been updated for anything newer than XP (though it might well still work...) Unfortunately, those aren't free and probably not worth buying if that's all you want (and, as implied above, I'm not at all sure GamutVision will work with Windows 7 anyway).
If the monitor's controls don't allow an option to change from "SRGB" to something that sounds like "Wide Gamut" or "AdobeRGB", "ProPhoto" etc, then chances are it doesn't support wide gamuts.

No matter if your monitor supports wide gamuts or not, in 99.9% of situations I would recommend to set it to SRGB anyway. And if your video card has a similar option, set it to SRGB too. SRGB is the de-facto standard of colour spaces on a computer and if you used anything else, you'd probably find out just how ill-equipped computers are at supporting other colour gamuts: some applications will be able to take advantage of it with special configurations, most won't, and those that do might do it in different ways to each other.

The biggest thing you lose with SRGB when compared to print is a bit of texture detail in highly saturated blue-green colour. Your eye probably can't see a lot of detail in highly saturated blue-green areas anyway. And even if your eye can and your monitor can, your OS and software may not support it or may require endless fiddling with to get it right.

Don't forget that if you are hell-bent on it, you can still edit photos in wider gamuts like AdobeRGB if you want to, even with an SRGB monitor. A colour management system ensures that while it's on the monitor it's translated to SRGB in a pleasant/accurate way but still can preserve that colour detail in the file.