I calibrated with this device a few times, and every time the result was worse than when I'd not calibrated my monitor. Firstly, it asks me the adjust the brightness manually. Why? I thought calibration software did this automatically. Then it adjusted the colors and it turned out horrible. Whites were muddy, saturation and contrast were too high.

And lastly, it offers to compare this monitor with others. In order to do so, it asks you to adjust brightness levels to 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100. It doesn't warn you to remember the original brightness level. After doing whatever it wanted to do, it produced an indecipherable, useless graph and gave me no option to get back to the original brightness level. So now I was left with a monitor at 100% brightness.

This thing is so seriously bad that I'm wondering if something is wrong with me.

I have the Spyder 3 and it works perfectly for me. Could it be a faulty unit?

I have spyder4pro and it works wonderfully well.

I do have to adjust the monitor brightness manually (with the monitor buttons) which takes a few moments.

I suggest either your unit is defective or you are not using it properly. Less likely there is an issue of incompatibility with your hardware and the spyder.

Mine works fine, albeit very differently than my old puck and software. The most interesting thing to me was the RGB levels ended up at 50/50/50, which was very different than before. Prints match perfectly though! Yes, the brightness is something you have to do manually.

Jo

I have it and it works very well. When you go through initial steps when it asks you what type of monitor you have you are selecting LCD correct? Also the next step asks you what features you are able to access and change in the OSD of the monitor like brightness RGB Gamma etc right? Well only check brightness, and let the software do the rest with the reccommended gamma, white point and contrast levels Usually it will be 2.2, 6500k etc. Then just run th ecalibration after checking the ambient light and making sure that you get the puck to read the light in the room right. I had to re position it a bunch of times for it to suggest a high brightness of 175-200. Anything lower than 175 is too dark on my monitor. Then it asks you agian to adjust the brightness during the first part of the calibration but to be honest I kept it higher than the target range. Let it finish and see what the sRGB accuracy says. It should be 100% and at least 80% Adobe RGB or near there. DO not mess with the color temps and gamma yourself in the monitors OSD menu. That will mess things up during calibration. The software has some pretty crap instructions to be honest. I have 3 monitors. 2 have OSD menus that I tried it on and adjusting it in the monitor proved to be bad. My other Main screen is an Apple cinema display that has no OSD and I am using it on a PC so I had to download a 3rd party app in order to adjust brightness properly since doing in the GPU software was not right at all.

Hope you sort it out as the spyder works very well when you get it sorted.