You want a viewing device that is not artificially "pumped up" in some way. Due to consumer stupidity and idiot salesmen, the trend in recent years has been for "sharp, bright and colorful" displays, even when the displayed video is being destroyed in the process.
Stores displays were often set to max saturation, sharpness and brightness values, because the obnoxious store showroom florescent lights would make a properly-set display look dim. Dim made colors look less vibrant. The "sharpness" thing came later, as everybody expected everything to be "HD". Nevermind that the displays were already high resolution -- often higher pixel counts than the 1080p/720p HDTVs!
In time, manufacturers started to optimize displays for the same scenario. Many default settings are just dreadful.
Few people ever stopped to think that "bright and colorful" looks like trash in your home or office. It abuses and butchers the image you're looking at, and it leads to much confusion when a person notices their DVD looks different on the TV set than it did on the computer. Or when a printed image/photo is different than what they saw on screen.
Many image purists have gone on to claim CRTs are superior to LCD for this reason, but that's just as incorrect. CRT had their own flaws with tint shifts, geometry and clarity.
Now that you know all that, here's the answer to your question...
Look for an LCD monitor that can be highly adjusted, especially for brightness/gamma, contrast/black level (IRE), temperature (in Kelvin, i.e. 6500K), and maybe even pixel brightness.
You don't want "bright and colorful", you want accurate. If the color is dull, then you want to see it in its full dull glory.
Many of the popular name brands like HP, Samsung and Dell look like crap. I've been very fond of LG and Acer branded monitors. In fact, there is a really decent 22" Acer for about $150-175. This is it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...SIN=B0016D02JE
Although a bit inferior to my now-unavailable (and smaller) LG monitor, this Acer has been an excellent unit for the second workstation. A few times I've considered going dual-monitor, with two of them side by side, for the heavyweight editing and production work.
There are far more pricey "studio-grade" calibrated monitors, but those are really not all that necessary. With consumer devices and monitors being all over the place, the need for perfection is not what it used to be -- even the most calibrated video work will look dismal on a lot of the junk displays used by customers and consumers.
