My TFT Monitor has Colour issues - How can I solve them?

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I design websites on an Dell Inspiron 9400/E1705 laptop, I’ve recently found out that the monitor doesn’t actually display colours too well, specifically black levels - which isn’t great as a designer!

One of my recent problems was converting a PSD to HTML. The design has a solid black background, or so I thought. After comments from the person who created the design, I realised that what I thought was a solid black, infact had a watermark logo in grey/black on the background.

I realise that one person’s LCD will differ from another, but I do need a monitor which strikes a middle ground.

I visited http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ and I opened up Catalyst Control Center on my laptop and I played around with the gamma and other settings. However I can never fully adhere to the tests on Lagom, but what I have now is better (or so I think!).

What I need to know is as a professional designer on a budget, what should I be doing next to get a setup that gives me colours that I can have more confidence in.

I see that many firms use Display Mate - I’ve only just come across this - should I be looking at using something like Display Mate? Is the weakness of my system in the laptop monitor? plug my laptop into a new monitor? or is the problem in the ATI Mobility Radeon? Will I have the problem whatever monitor I choose? Or is there a way to calibrate my existing monitor? Catalyst Control Center doesn’t seem to give me enough control to pass the tests at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

I’ve also heard someone mention using the tools mentioned here and installing [URL=“http://victal.at.tut.by/”]these - doesn’t look too official!

What should I be doing next? Obviously I want to get the best results with the smallest financial outlay.

Would be really interested to hear other people’s recommendation for my next step. Thanks!

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I think every designer should have good hardware calibration tools for these things! They’ll configure your system to give you ridiculously accurate representations of the intended colours.
A fair few photographers I’ve worked with used Spyder (http://www.datacolor.eu/en/products/index.html), who do a range of suitable tools and the prices aren’t stupid either.

One big problem with laptop screens (with a lot of screens really, but often much more noticeable on laptops) is that the backlighting is very uneven.