Well I ended up buying a Dell 2408wfp which is a wide gamut monitor. I also dropped the cash on a Spyder Pro3 as I read that this monitor needs to be calibrated to get good results.

Well, even after calibration, for the life of me I can not get the Dell to display good colours. The reds are still way too oversaturated, so all skin tones suck compared to my laptop screen which is handling skin tones quite nicely.

I have tried all the suggestions on many different forums and many people with Macs seem to have this problem with no apparent solution. I've tried using the Dell preset 'sRGB mode" which does get rid of the oversaturated reds, but it takes it too far and everthing is undersaturated and washed out. There is no "in between" setting.

Een using the custom RGB mode and setting the sliders manually I cannot get good realistic colours.

My laptop colour manages fine with Photoshop and Safari (for some reason the recent versions of Firefox, even though "colour managed", have dropped support for ICC v4 profiles and only support ICC v2.

Well I'm very dissappointed because apart from this issue, the monitor is great, I love the real estate, the extremely solid stand and the variety of connectors, but now I'm going to have to send it back and try and find something with all these features, but as a standard gamut monitor.

If anyone one has the Dell 2408 and has got it to display skin tones correctly, I'd love to know how!
I don't understand how this monitor could get so many raving reviews with such a fatal flaw?