Don't do the max contrast and brightness. That's ridiculous. Setting brightness to maximum will make it impossible to get a real black. I don't know why so many instructions tell you to do that.

My experience is that some monitors just cannot be adjusted to sRGB standard. My laptop is one of those. My monitor at home is much brighter and shows much more detail at low levels than my laptop does. If I adjust my laptop to show those details, then the brights are blown out.

Your best bet is to adjust as best you can so that dither patterns with specific values match up with solid patterns of other specific values.

An example is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Srgbnonlinearity.png

There is a very small image there. If you squint or blur your vision or stand far away, they should match up.

Regarding the color temperature, just make sure that white things look white, not blue or pink.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)