>> That's simply not true.  Printed images can be darker, lighter, more saturated, less saturated etc.  It depends on your monitor and printer color profile settings.

True. What I should have said was, even at its most optimal, it wont match. Yes, there are basic settings you can tinker with, but they have their limits. And all the adjustments and all the calibrating just wont help as much as you think it will, sorry. If you look at the way Photoshop, for example, allows you to make colour choices, it will tell you when you've chosen something that cant be printed (the infamous little yellow triangle), and it will make its best guess as to what it will sorta kinda maybe look like -- and that guess will always seem like a dun, greyed down version of the colour you want.

Yes, the technology has gotten better over the years, but the simple fact remains: a monitor can reproduce over 16 million different colours. Most printers cant -- at its very best, a high end professional laser printer can handle about a quarter million. A monitor can reproduce highly saturated colours like neons or the ones at the far range of colour recognition, like ultraviolets or infrareds. Unless you use a specialty fifth-colour ink, your printer cant -- and even with the specialty ink it's a bit of a crap shoot because you're limited to the hues provided by the suoplier. A monitor can give you a rich, dense black. Unless you make a double pass on a six-colour machine, your printer cant reproduce that either. Monitors will always have a far wider range on which to draw because of the very nature of the way colours are created with light, and when you throw LCD technology into the mix, it's just compounding the issues even more. Screens like that are brighter and sharper than even the best computer monitor, with an even more complex range of colour technology underpinning everything.

The bottom line: you will get reasonably close, probably acceptably enough that most people wont be able to tell much of a difference because it's doubtful they'll hold the printed piece right next to the monitor for comparison. But it will never be completely bang on.

If you still want to pursue this, google "colour bars" and look for that image we all see used on TV sets when they're experiencing "technical difficulty". It has a fairly wide range and should serve you pretty well.

docandraider.com -- the collected cartoons of Doc and Raider