color management - How does calibration of my monitor affect viewing of my photos on other monitors?

I asked a question about how hardware calibration works. The answer provided was this:

These hardware calibration devices work by running a piece of software on the computer that displays a series of colors and gray levels. By placing the spyder reading device on the computer monitor, it is able to "see" what the computer is displaying. By taking a series of measurements, a profile of the total system including video drivers and monitor quirks can be assessed. Once this profile is built, it is usually loaded into the OS so that the monitor then displays calibrated image colors.

The question is: how does the calibration of my monitor affect the viewing of my photos on other monitors?

My line of thought is, since I am editing the photo to a true color calibration (vs. what I think is correct according to my monitor without calibration), the end users monitor will (hopefully) display the picture more accurately then what it would look like if I did it without hardware calibration. Is my line of thought correct? Am I missing something?

Answer

The only sensible thing you can do is to calibrate your monitor and work your images with respect to how they are intended to be displayed.

The problem is that there is not one way for monitors to be miscalibrated. An uncalibrated monitor will simply give different colors. Different uncalibrated monitors are likely to give different colors and the magnitude of the difference will also differ from monitor to monitor. So, any time you change colors in your images, some people will see things more the way you intended and some people less. However, if you do it on a calibrated system, better more calibrated monitors will see something better.