Hi Roger,
It has been my experience over and over, that the monitor is too bright!
I don't pretend to know the abilities of all the profiling packages that have come out lately which purport to read the brightness and allow that to be set, but I don't own such a sophisticated version as of yet.
I hope Terry gets on here. He has a profiling tool that does address the brightness.

In my case, I use a premade Epson Profile for Premium Luster and also Premium Glossy. I make test prints. If the prints appear too dark, compared to the monitor, I take the approach that Epson put some quality effort into making the profiles for my printer and their paper.
I assume the print is correct!
Once I get past that, I turn the brightness down, (usually to about 40-45%) and I also pay attention to the shadow detail and highlight detail and adjust the contrast to match too. (Usually close to 80%.

*NOW* I profile the monitor for color accuracy, and it works for me.

Terry will be along shortly, I'm sure. He has an iMatch thing that sets brightness.
So hang in there.

Fred

Thanks Fred and Terry. I'll reply to you both in this note, since you both mention monitor brightness. I am very much aware of the problem caused by a monitor that is too bright. I went to the Epson "Epsite" showroom, exhibition and support site in Tokyo and it was the first thing they told me, and said that unless you profile your monitor and adjust its brightness there is NO WAY to secure consistent prints. So I bit the bullet and bought a DataColor Spyder monitor profiler. This does include a brightness setting, which currently is set to 120CD/MSQ. This is on the calibration I did yesterday, when the light was still quite bright. Last month I did a profile in the evening and the level was set to 90. But at that time I did not have the printer/paper profile right and there were other things wrong with my prints than darkness. <wry grin>

Your comments encourage me to believe I was on the right track suspecting the variable level of room lighting. I live on the top floor of a large condominium in suburban Tokyo, and all morning the sun streams directly into the room. Even with the curtains closed, the ambient light level is reported by the Spyder as "Extremely bright--unsuitable for accurate colour management." But we use indirect lighting in the room, and the general level is very low once we have to switch the lights on. Spyder called this level "Low--ideal for accurate colour management."

Incidentally, the technical expert at DataColor with whom I corresponded was not impressed by the accuracy of Epson printer/paper profiles, saying they were a good first approximation (!) but could benefit from detailed tweaking using a colorimeter. These are much more expensive than the monitor calibration device but fortunately I was able to get mine secondhand from a professional photographer friend who has gone over to a pro lab for all his exhibition prints and no longer needs to profile his own. Support from Datacolor was excellent, just as if I had bought it new directly from them... they even gave me a registration code for software that had been upgraded since my unit was sold.

I'll also mention that the prints are not very much too dark, just slightly (but noticeably) darker than they should be. Looking at them in the bright sunlight streaming through my windows this morning they really don't look too bad although yesterday evening when I showed them to my wife they looked rather worse. I think what I should do is profile the monitor in the evening, when the lighting level is low, and set up the image files for printing during the daytime, when I will probably have to make them brighter. That way I may get prints that look a bit too bright or "thin" under bright daylight but look fine under artificial light. That's a more acceptable compromise than what I have now.

My budget for equipment is spent out right now but I'll certainly look into Ott lights. If "inexpensive" means the same thing to you and me, Terry, I'll get one from next month's budget. I'm a pensioner, so I have to watch the pennies.

Roger,
I don't have any affiliations with Epson at all, but for the Data Color technician to make that statement sounds a bit self serving since they sell profiling tools.
I also have to disagree based on common sense and my experience.
Not only do I use Epson paper, but I have a decent selection of Ilford Glossy and Ilford Pearl. I also have some HP glossy.
My experience shows me that a print on Ilford Smooth Gloss using their profile supplied by Ilford for their paper and my printer, and printing the same image on Epson Prem Glossy using their profile for my printer yields identical prints.
So for me to accept the words ot the technician at Data Color is to throw away the evidence that both profiles produced the same prints.
That leaves us with the choice: both profiles were independently wrong, or  the Data Color guru was trying to push you toward buying some product.

Ilford would strive to make their profiles perfect to ensure that you will like the results and buy more paper.
Epson probably sells more medium and higher end printers than all the rest, and it behooves them to make the profiles accurate for the same reason, a happy customer, buys more ink and paper.

I don't really blame the Data Color guy...     since, many times, I try to ask people to try Qimage Ultimate and hope they like it as much as I do.

Fred

My problem is getting the prints to look like they do on the monitor. The ones that do, look pretty good under all kinds of lighting, but the ones that don't, look bad under almost all lighting! I was hoping that by having the monitor calibrated for when I use it under extremely bright conditions, and again for our usual evening low-light conditions, I could get consistent prints!

But now I've had a different idea. I note the brightness setting that Spyder tells me gives 90CD/MSQ and the one it says gives me 120CD/MSQ as percentages on my LCD monitor controls. Spyder instructions tell you never to alter the settings once you have calibrated the monitor, but if I just note and use the monitor brightness control and set it to the two different percentages (they are about 53% and 94% respectively) then I can make the monitor dim or bright as appropriate and (hopefully) get consistent prints. "Dim" just generally seems better all round, so I may just stick with that. There may be some secondary effects, i.e., changing the brightness may slightly modify the spectral response, but I do notice that the colour gamut shows IDENTICAL coverage of colour space, very close to Adobe RBB, for both the 90 and the 120 calibrations, so I'll take that chance.

Fred, sorry for the delay in this reply. Several things came up that kept me away from the computer. Hope you're still in the loop. I seem to have misled you. My desire to make the monitor and the prints look like each other naturally and inevitably requires that I have a monitor that shows images which will THEN result in prints that look as near the same as possible on both screen and paper, considering the different contrast range, etc., of additive and subtractive images. The monitor has to come first. The only reason for trying to tweak the monitor so that it looked like my best prints was to try to get a handle on what settings would give me a consistently achievable likeness in other, later, prints from the same monitor. As I see images FIRST on the monitor and THEN as prints, I have to make all my tweaks on the image I see on the screen! So I want to set and forget the monitor profile.

I am now pretty happy with the print quality I am getting, and Qimage is a major help. I have settled on 90cd/sqm as the best compromise monitor profile brightness, with +3 "fill" applied at print time by Qimage. By the way, I was disappointed with the reception given to my prints at the first photo club meeting. Neither got even a "mention" in the rankings and one elderly expert kindly suggested I might like to bring along some more snaps at their next meeting. Argh! One problem I have in relating to other photographers is that most of my efforts go into making VR panoramas (you can see some at Microsoft's photosynth.net site in the "Rogerama" collection). But now I can produce prints with consistently high quality I am getting a lot more fun out of the more conventional side of photography. I've been going back over the last few years looking at the "snaps" I took on the side at various panorama shoots, and printing them. For the next photo club meet I will be taking along a triptych I took of the London "Big Eye" ferris wheel, from along the embankment, from the top of the ride, and looking up through the structure from ground level. Let's see what they think of that. The prints are--though I says it mesel' what didn't oughta--quite beautiful.

Wow, yes. I think I finally got it. Thanks, Terry. What you are saying is, if the printer/paper profile I have painstakingly prepared by reading several hundred colour patches results in dark prints, adjust the monitor until it shows dark images! I had both parts of the problem clear, but I was taking the work flow as the decisive factor in deciding the order in which to settle them. But I do think I got the monitor problem right: calibrating it for a brightness that is higher than I really need.

It could also have something to do with the angle at which I view the screen. In the "advanced" tools that came with my upgrade of the Spyder profiler there is one to measure the evenness of the screen illumination. Mine is much dimmer in some areas than others (it's a low-price DELL 22" LCD) so it matters where the important image content comes, as the calibration is only true for the narrow central region of the screen. This interacts with the added loss of brightness you get when you are looking at the screen at an angle. <sigh> NOTHING about colour management is simple. That's why it's SO MUCH FUN. (Ha ha!). This year I upgraded my computer. Next year (she-who-must-be-obeyed permitting) I will upgrade my display.

Great forum. Great help. Great product!