to calibrate or not?
 

I just got a spiffy new monitor off of Ebay. The seller told me it was calibrated, but who knows, right?

I read somewhere that a good, accurate calibration is like a two hour long process. When I followed the video university tutorial on how to do it to another TV, it took around 15 minutes.

What I want to know is, should I try to calibrate it myself, or take it somewhere and have it done? Obviously I don't want to pay for it, but the whole reason I got it is so that I'd have something by which to accurately judge color, contrast, etc. when shooting and editing. Think I can do it myself if I follow the steps in that tutorial?

What kind of monitor is it? If it's a pro one you should have all the necessary knobs.

You can also check out this link about monitor calibration

http://www.videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

It better be pro! It's a Sony PVM 14m2u. All the knobs are there--I'm wondering if there's anything that would prohibit me from calibrating it correctly, like not having some fancy piece of gear that a pro facility has.

Yeah seems to be a pro one, so if you follow the link I provided you should be able to calibrate it yourself between 95 to 100% accuracy. If you want to be absolute sure, you have to use a hardware waveform monitor I think.

Alright, I tried it. Hope I did it right--still only took like 15 minutes.