Sorry Damien, it got late and I went to bed last night.
I compared quite a few prints and they are definitely brighter than what I see on the screen and I do calibrate for the prints. Whites, neutrals and colours are good except that they are not bright enough.
There is a Fine-tuning option to adjust luminance but it has limits of 20% either way and that didn't seem to help anything.
I did a quick calibration the usual way, choosing "maximum luminance" instead of using the usual "absolute luminance" setting of 100 Cd/m2. The monitor brightened way up, ridiculously so, so the monitor is capable of brightening; just how to get there with some control.
I'm reading everything I can get my hands on to understand deeper how this all works and want to try a few things, just need more time then I currently have. The calibration software & updates I've done are suspect as well so I'm playing with that. I sure appreciated what I found from you on this topic here.
In the meantime, it would help to hear your thoughts...