You misunderstand what I mean about the importance of a calibrator here. Calibrators are important to ensure absolute accuracy, but in this case you need an ICC profile for a wide gamut monitor. You'll be lucky if you find it on NEC's abortion of a website (at least it was 2 years ago). A Spyder 3 will do just nicely for this.
What was so frustrating is trying to make things look right again. Desktop wallpapers looked horrid unless artifically desaturated by applying the monitor's colour profile to the image, but then it would look wrong in photoshop. I used to use free image viewers and I had one I liked a lot. Eventually I was forced to pay for ACDSee Pro so I could look at images properly, and even that doesn't do a perfect job. Firefox 2 was the only browser that obeys output colour profiles, and even that was a mission to figure out and make the internet look right. Firefox 3.0 came out and that functionality was removed. Firefox 3.5 brought it back but for a while I couldn't upgrade my browser or the internet wouldn't look right. and it still doesn't because flash isn't colour managed either so a website which incorporates a mix of flash and standard HTML looks horribly broken. Everything was a mission to get looking right and there's no consistency between apps. Even now my panorama program (actually all panorama programs) don't support display profiles rendering the colour correction features of the software completely useless since I haven't a clue what I'm looking at. The final picture looks completely different when loaded in photoshop.
I even did a wedding shoot in a very dusty environment with subdued lighting one day and I desaturated them only slightly to make them look right. When I finished the photos I realised my colour profile reset with the latest service pack update for some reason and every single one of my photos looked horrendously dull so processed them all again. Speaking of service pack the Windows XP theme makes your eyes bleed on a wide gamut monitor, so you may need to change theme (i'm on a black / grey theme now).
For an example of the difference have a look at this picture of a very pale and pasty girl: Overly saturated on the right in a normal dumb image viewer.
Having a wide gamut monitor you need to take care with what you do. That's the only major frustration.
In general you won't be wasting your money with an NEC monitor. I highly recommend them. Mine's been nothing but perfect (despite it's frustrations) for more than 2 years. Both monitors are high quality IPS screens and both have internal lookup tables for colour correction which is the only right way to apply calibration curves (you may need to look at software for calibrating your monitor since not all software supports hardware lookup tables. NEC's SpectraView II software works well)
Windows picture viewer reads the colour space from images, but converts them to sRGB rather than the display profile, just like 99.9% of other software out there.
If you want to take advantage of wider colour spaces then you'll need to find yourself a decent printing company. They are out there and the cost of prints increases quite a bit. Often they use a LED on photo paper with chemical developers to get the prints. The results are stunning, but don't waste your time ProPhotoRGB. It's a great colour space in theory but in practice there's no printing technology or paper that is readily available that takes advantage of much more than the AdobeRGB space, and even in nature when you're taking photos there' not a lot you will see that falls out of even sRGB let alone AdobeRGB. Taking photos of lasers and LEDs yet, but otherwise no, and the more severe the differences between colour profiles the more lossy the conversion.
Which ever road you go down I think you'll be more than impressed with either screens, just be ware that the wide gamut screen comes with quite a few drawbacks for only a little gain.
