Spyder2 – How do I know when I’m calibrated?

I finally got myself a Colorvision Spyder2 yesterday, and have had a go at using it. Puzzlement. My monitor is an LCD one with on screen controls for brightness, contrast, etc. It saves the settings in a file, so when the Spyder instructions say "don’t touch the monitor controls" what it means in my case is "don’t change those files." OK.
I went through the procedure with the Spyder and it all seemed straightforward enough. At the end it showed a picture and a before/after calibration toggle. The "after" was noticable warmer and more pleasing, so that looked promising. I saved that profile and it said it was now the default and I shouldn’t move the monitor controls. Still OK.

I then hit the exit button on the monitor control dialog and it asked if I wanted to save the monitor settings. Good point – I hit "yes". A box then appeared asking if I wanted to use these monitor settings as my default – I checked it. But when I hit OK to close the monitor settings dialog, something happened. All the colours, brightness and contrast changed, notably so. Hmmm. Maybe something got reset? So now I’m not sure quite where I stand. Is my monitor calibrated, or did everything get screwed up right at the end?

I started the Spyder software again with the intention of doing the process again, but the first step is to reset the monitor to it’s factory defaults. If I do that I’ll end up in the same place as last time, and since it takes 30 minutes or so to do the calibration I thought maybe I’d ask: how can I tell if my monitor is actually calibrated correctly?

I finally got myself a Colorvision Spyder2 yesterday, and have had a go at using it. Puzzlement. My monitor is an LCD one with on screen controls for brightness, contrast, etc. It saves the settings in a file, so when the Spyder instructions say "don’t touch the monitor controls" what it means in my case is "don’t change those files." OK.
I went through the procedure with the Spyder and it all seemed straightforward enough. At the end it showed a picture and a before/after calibration toggle. The "after" was noticable warmer and more pleasing, so that looked promising. I saved that profile and it said it was now the default and I shouldn’t move the monitor controls. Still OK.

I then hit the exit button on the monitor control dialog and it asked if I wanted to save the monitor settings. Good point – I hit "yes". A box then appeared asking if I wanted to use these monitor settings as my default – I checked it. But when I hit OK to close the monitor settings dialog, something happened. All the colours, brightness and contrast changed, notably so. Hmmm. Maybe something got reset? So now I’m not sure quite where I stand. Is my monitor calibrated, or did everything get screwed up right at the end?

I started the Spyder software again with the intention of doing the process again, but the first step is to reset the monitor to it’s factory defaults. If I do that I’ll end up in the same place as last time, and since it takes 30 minutes or so to do the calibration I thought maybe I’d ask: how can I tell if my monitor is actually calibrated correctly?

Ummmm – print something? Compare it with what you see onscreen. If you’re happy – consider it calibrated.

When I boot there is a popup screen saying that the monitor calibration data has been loaded. I have to click OK.

If I am understanding what you are saying correctly it sounds like you are trying to save your on-monitor brightness and contrast _after_ you calibrate with the Spyder. You should be setting your contrast, brightness etc. ahead of time and saving those settings. THEN use the Spyder to create your profile.

The Spyder software says, as part of the process, to reset your screen to factory defaults, then fiddle with the brightness, contrast, RGB sliders and so on as part of the calibration. I just did what I was told.
One thing I did try was to create a new profile without doing that factory reset or indeed changing any of the screen settings. When I switch between that new one and the original one I created there’s hardly any difference. I think that tells me I have it right, but I’m not absolutely sure…