Hi Penny,
This is a common question asked by photographers and the answer might seems complicated but it comes down to your budget.
Enter the world of the ISP panel that I refer to in my other post. I search the web and formulate this answer for you.
IPS stands for "In-Plane Switching". It means that the crystals in the LCD (liquid crystal display) move parallel to the plane of the screen, rather than perpendicular to it as in TN panels (the most common displays). The main advantage of this is there is very little colour and brightness shift as you change viewing angle. This allows more accurate colour calibration.
Also, most high-end IPS screens support 8 bits per colour for each pixel, i.e. true 24 bit colour, while the cheaper TN panels often only have 6 bits per colour channel. However some of the lower priced "e-IPS" screens used in the cheaper IPS monitors including the Dell U2311H and similarly priced IPS screens from NEC and others, only have 6 true bits per channel and extend this to 8 bits using "A-FRC" (advanced frame rate control).
Most monitors support sRGB space fairly well, since sRGB is a limited gamut colour space. Some IPS monitors like the Dell U2410 support a wider gamut, closer to the Adobe RGB colour space while the Dell U2311H is sRGB.
The gamut of professional CMYK printers extends beyond the sRGB gamut. Because the process is different (subtractive as opposed to additive mixing) and the primaries are different (cyan, magenta, yellow), the gamut includes some colours that are outside the sRGB gamut, while the sRGB gamut has some colours not included in the CMYK gamut. So a printer (including good home inkjet printers like the Epson R3000) can print some colours that an sRGB monitor can't display. However the CMYK printer gamut is largely contained within the Adobe 1998 RGB gamut. So a monitor that can display the full Adobe RGB gamut can also display pretty much the full range of colours printable by typical good quality CMYK printers. (The converse is not true - CMYK printers cannot print all the colours in the Adobe RGB gamut).
Also note that the gamut of image sensors also extends beyond sRGB. An sRGB monitor cannot display all the colours your camera can capture. So even an un-manipulated image might contain colours outside sRGB. Of course to see these, you would need to shoot raw and then convert into a colour space with a wider gamut, such as Adobe RGB, Pro Photo RGB or CIELAB.
So if you print using high quality printers, you might want a wide gamut monitor like the Dell U2410 so you can see the same colours when editing. sRGB is the standard for Web images so for Web work, an sRGB monitor is a better choice.
Conclusion: even for us amateur photographers a display with IPS technology will be better. But like I said in the beginning, (1) it comes down to your budget (Dell U2410 - R5,5k) and (2) because these are no ordinary panels to get hold of an IPS panel is going to be much more difficult.
We will have to investigate this even further....
