> I know a few people who have probably ended up spending something like
> that over the course of the ten or twenty years they've been doing a
> hobby, sure.

Didn't you used to hang out with some gamers, surely they'd all spent in 
excess of $1000 on their PCs?  Also nobody at your work who is 
interesting in cars and has spend more than $1000 on a car in one go?  I 
find it hard to believe nobody at your work owns a dSLR, which surely 
cost around $1000 to spend in one go.  Spending that sort of money on a 
hobby is more common than you think.

> Surely you don't actually need an expensive specially calibrated monitor
> just to ensure that IBM Blue comes out as IBM Blue. Presumably there are
> standardised ways of describing specific print colours, and the
> advertisers will just tell you what colour they want according to some
> such standard.

Sure, but then how to mix that with the rest of your page layout?  They 
certainly don't just guess what the final outcome will be and hope it 
comes out looking ok.

> I can believe that the likes of the billion-selling top magazines would
> go to these lengths. But Linux Format? I rather doubt it. Generally if
> an image looks reasonable on a regular screen, it looks reasonable in
> print too. Unless it's crucial for your images to look "perfect",

Did you ever try actually comparing printed colours to your monitor 
using cheap consumer equipment?  I don't think anyone would call that a 
"reasonable" match.  Besides, the artists and designers who choose 
colours get very annoyed when the final product looks a totally 
different shade to what they designed.

> Now there's something I hadn't thought of... For most magazines, exact
> colour probably isn't critical.

I think you'd be surprised what level of work goes into making even a 
low circulation full-colour magazine.  If you've designed a nice bright 
orange and green colour scheme to give a certain impact, you're going to 
be pretty annoyed when the orange comes out brown and doesn't match any 
more, which could have been avoided by buying a $1000 calibrated 
monitor.  Of course for one-offs there are ways around it (eg the 
printer sending you a sample, you tweaking it, repeat a few times) but 
for anyone regularly making such a magazine you *will* have calibrated 
monitors.

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