Bizarre result when calibrating screen

[Thornton]

Today I was prompted to calibrate my screen again. I must have calibrated it about 6 times so far since getting a Spyder 5 Express (reminder set on monthly). It is my understanding that a laptop screen like mine tends to be too blue without calibration, so I am not surprised that when I compare the before and after "test card", the calibrated view looks rather warmer. Today, however, the calibrated view was simply awful: far too red, so much so that what are normally grey areas on the screen, looked very pink. Normally whitish clouds in some of my photos looked like sunsets.

My setup was the same as usual. My room is unlit, north-facing, and it is very dull outside today (again, as usual!).

I immediately conducted a second calibration. For this, I held the Spyder against the screen (I was concerned that it MAY have moved very slightly during the first run). The result was totally different, and looks fine (AFAIK!), certainly much closer to the usual result.

I wonder what may have caused the anomalous result?

[Manfred M]

Don't worry about it as it can happen on occasion and when I get a weird result I do like you did and just re-run the profiling / calibration process. I will also compare my new profile and old profile just to make sure that nothing strange has happened.

The monthly profiling is a hold-over from the days of CRT screens that did lose calibration fairly quickly. Modern LCD screens are incredibly stable and profiling and calibrating even once a year seems to be overkill. I generally do this and at the end of the day I often wonder why I bothered because nothing has changed. One knowledgeable person told me that the only time one can expect to see significant changes in screen output is just before the screen dies...

[Thornton]

Don't worry about it as it can happen on occasion and when I get a weird result I do like you did and just re-run the profiling / calibration process. I will also compare my new profile and old profile just to make sure that nothing strange has happened.

The monthly profiling is a hold-over from the days of CRT screens that did lose calibration fairly quickly. Modern LCD screens are incredibly stable and profiling and calibrating even once a year seems to be overkill. I generally do this and at the end of the day I often wonder why I bothered because nothing has changed. One knowledgeable person told me that the only time one can expect to see significant changes in screen output is just before the screen dies...

Thanks Manfred. I must say that I nearly didn’t bother to perform the calibration today because I didn’t think that I’d seen any change over the previous calibrations.

Julian