I don't use hardware to calibrate. I have a Viewsonic monitor that came with software called "Perfect Suite". When you would compare Adobe Gamma to Levels, then Perfect Suite is like Curves. You set black and white and have several intermediate brightneses that are corrected. I find this very intuitive and what comes out of my printer matches quite well what I see on the monitor. It can never match perfectly as a monitor shows RGB (and not even sRGB except for very expensive exceptions) and your printer four inks with eventually some helpers. The more helpers, the closer, but there will always be some hues that are not identical.

As for the camera: when colours need to be very close to perfect, I use a QPCard with Raw+Bibble with Claire plugin.

http://www.qpcard.se/BizPart.aspx?tabId=31&prod=3&catId=1
http://nexi.com/239

The only important thing is that you have to be happy with what you do.

There are no Borg. All resistance is fertile.