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I would advise spending a bit extra and getting something really decent if you love your photography. The extra dollars are made up for in life expectancy anyway. I have an NEC SpectraView that is pushing 13 years now and still is an excellent performer, 97% coverage of AdobeRGB gamut and I never regretted spending the $1000 at a time for a monitor. In the past 13 years my dad has spend nearly the same amount constantly replacing cheap crap, and while Dell Ultrasharps have fantastic performance for the buck I have had 2 die on me at work over the years where the laminations between the layers of the LCD start failing.
There's a few things to look for in good monitors:
1. In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel design. These offer perfect viewing angles. Some of the Dell Ultrasharp monitors are PVA, and cheap screens are TN. Stay away from the latter two as no amount of calibration will make them look good.
2. Calibrators. Buy an external calibrator. It's an additional few hundred dollars but it's amazing how much displays can drift with only a few weeks of use. This is also important as a calibrator will create a colour profile for your monitor which as Max said above Photoshop will proof the images so they look correct on your monitor. The downside to this is that some programs don't understand this so while some software looks right other software (Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer for example) will look quite wrong.
3. If you're going down this route I highly recommend get a screen with a high bit colour lookup table (LUT), but you pay for the privilege. I think most NEC Multisync displays have 14bit lookup tables in them these days (that's just an example, NEC P series monitors start at around $800 so likely out of your price range). The important part here is that the calibrator directly writes a lookup table in the monitor to display the correct colours. The other options are: Adjust the lookup table on the video card, or approximate using gamma correction in windows. Both of the latter options cause the image quality to degrade.
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