Why calibrate?

[Jamey Brown]

I've been trying to calibrate both my desktop and my laptop with the Spyder5Pro for about a year now with not so great success.   The other day I decided to reset my desktop to factory settings and order some test prints and they came in today.  My prints seem to be darker or have more contrast, I honestly don't know the difference between both, but the color seems good. The manual setting for my brightness is turned all the way down to 0 and I've gone to my manual manual (yes, two manual) color settings per Damien's settings and lowered those as well. My prints still are too dark or have too much contrast (again, I don't know the difference between those). So, I've gotten the best comparison between monitor and my lab prints WITHOUT using my calibrator.  Is there a reason that I should now go and calibrate my screen with my Spyder5Pro?  It won't make my screens brightness go down any more since I change those settings manually when calibrating anyways, correct?

[Damien Symonds]

http://www.damiensymonds.net/2011/09/must-i-calibrate.html