P70 built-in display calibrator -- does ambient light make a difference?

The calibrator built into some Thinkpad P-series models has gotten quite a few bad reviews (indeed, quite a lot of reviews have indicated that the calibration makes things worse than straight from the factory). While I can't use the calibrator directly from Linux, I've been wondering whether I could calibrate the screen in Windows, snarf the generated ICC profile, and install it under Linux.

But what I'm wondering is whether some of the problems people have encountered are due to ambient light interfering with the profiling. I have no reason to think that the lid is perfectly light tight, in which case it might interfere with the profiling. So, has anyone tried calibrating their screen with the built-in device in a completely dark room? Unless others have tried it and found that it has no effect, I'm going to try it at some point when it's convenient for me.

 

So from what I've learned, the built-in calibrator is not especially sophisticated. But it turns out that I have a Gretag-Macbeth i1 Pro spectrometer left over from another project, which I used to do a proper calibration (using DisplayCal) under Linux. The screen was clearly in quite good calibration beforehand; it looks like the gamma was just slightly off.

 

Well with the compact size of the calibrator I won't expect it to do well compared to much more expensive and larger calibrator.

I'd say the i1 displaypro or colormunki works well, you also have the spyder5 that's more popular compared to the i1 so it's easier to find in the used market.