If nothing has changed; on essentially rag matte media with thin coatings such as Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, Sommerset, some other FA matte textured media, the APS profiles will actually be a bit too blue -red in the shadows. The profile is trying to compensate for what the eye doesn't see the same. The built in profiler by HP has effectively , less grid points, more smoothing thus smoothing of the data in the tables creating less accurate but smoother profiles in the bottom end of the profiles. Since the printing range Dmax and gamut is reduced on matte there is in fact more room for error over photo substrates. I think APS errs towards a blue red shadow on these media types, BUT, on more substantial coated matte media such as Epson Enhanced Matte, HP Smooth Fine Art, they become much closer in proximity between profiles both APS and Easy.
The reds on say Photo Rag are less stellar than Epson in the shadows, but as soon as you go to the optimised HP Smooth FA, they are in most part accurate and subtle making prints for display with equally high marks on appearance than any other. Let's say that if you have an image with a lot of saturated reds, red with dark shadows, the type that should be printed on photo material, yet it's going on matte anyway. That image would be better in the reds on Epson than Canon or HP.
But, let's take some images with extended greens, blues. Same type of image that should be printed on photo material. This will quite surely be better on HP, and Canon ( before the 7900 9900 come out....)
Where it stands is only on some images will there be some difficulty printing on less than optimal media. For the most part there really isn't any "real" problem of printing reds on the Z.
As for Printer manages Color> You don't really want to do that if you can avoid it. The reason being that the printer doesn't use ICC transformations if used. The printer actually uses LUT's . IF it is more pleasing, maybe I should have looked further into it, but the results were not accurate enough for me. IF your prints on photo media are better with Printer Manages Color, there is something amiss in the workflow with profiles.
As far as soft proofing goes, I agree , there always has been too much error with the HP Vivera pigments and the return tables to RGB. The good news (consolation?) is the prints always look better than the screen soft proof. I have no idea why HP didn't take me serious on that one. Perhaps they think it is trivial. Fact is most photographers now rely on soft proofing, if only to try new profiles, media, or just checking the print before risking an expensive sheet of media.
