Hopefully someone will answer your question directly. I can't answer your question completely, since I am in the same process of looking for the right LCD monitor. But to whatever other replies come along, please add this:
You can completely ignore many of the manufacturers specifications, such as viewing angle. They all sound great on paper, but the ONLY way to know how much color shift you will get by moving your head up and down or back and forth is to look at the actual monitor. You will be amazed at how two monitors with the identical horizontal and vertical off-axis angles of view (typically 160 to 170 degrees) can be completely different. Many monitors show tiny differences when moving your head left and right, but HUGE differences when moving up and down. Consider that on these monitors, the colors at the bottom of the screen can be substantially different than the same colors at the top of the screen, because your angle of view to the bottom might be about 15 to 20 degrees downward, while your angle to the top my be about the same upward, depending on the size of the screen and your viewing distance. It's hard to adjust the color in a photograph when a small movement of your head shifts the color by several levels.
Go to a computer store and compare monitors with your own eyes. Look for a large swath of a medium color like blue, and then move your head left/right and up/down and watch for brightness shifts. Be sure to look at the (very expensive) Apple Cinema displays to see a monitor which has almost no color shift in either axis. Other manufacturers sometimes produce displays without this color shift problem, but it varies by model and changes often.
Brightness may not matter much, in my opinion. Almost every LCD panel is plenty bright, maybe too bright. You may have to turn the LCD brightness down so it won't be so drastically different than the whiteness of the paper you will be printing on. Contrast may have the same problems. My current cheap 22" LCD panel is much brighter and contrastier than any of my Trinitron CRTs ever were, and I like to turn both controls down quite a bit for photography work. Brightness, contrast, and response time are great for word processing and gaming, but over the top for photo editing.
Manufacturers change thier offerings so often, and even change the maker of the LCD panel in a given model of display, that it's quite difficult to nail down the perfect LCD. Still looking.....
