You know, Alan, for someone who had no idea what Andrew and Jeff, et al were talking about wrt the Mac OS, Epson drivers, ABW and profiles you're being more than a little heavy-handed in your reply to the previous poster. And let's be brutally honest, you had no clue what they were talking about.
@uaiomex - ABW is not a natively colour (grey) managed process. It's a proprietary printer driver path that is supposed to be optimised for printing b&w. It's designed to work as a black box. You take what it gives you and aren't supposed to do anything else with it. Given that ABW was designed as a black box it was not designed to be used with ICC profiles. Big downside is you couldn't soft proof with it.
Prior to, about, a year ago you were able to effectively override the black box and kludge it to allow the use of specially made profiles both in the Mac and Windows operating systems. Eric Chan (of Adobe) created a number of profiles for the 3800 and 3880 printers and before he shut down his custom profiling service would create profiles for other Epson printers to be used with ABW. As these were true ICC profiles, you could soft proof and still print having the benefits of ABW (more black/less colour ink used, deeper DMax). Using these profiles produces lovely prints that are far and away better than what ABW produces without profiles.
Roughly a year ago, I believe, Apple changed the way colour management works in the Mac OS. It stopped allowing you to override so ICC profiles can no longer be used with ABW on a Mac running OS and driver versions of about a year ago. You can still print with ABW, just not with profiles. ABW is, for all intents and purposes, a specially built 'printer manages colour' option. Apple has stopped allowing you to select a printer managed pipeline when selecting application (Photoshop or LR) managed colour (grey). What they've done is eliminated the possibility of double colour management in printing if you forget to turn off printer colour management (as with most things Apple, they've dumbed it down). The downside is it eliminates the ability to use profiles with ABW. The Windows OS, as of current Windows 7 and Epson driver version 6.5 (on the 3800, can't speak for what the current version on other printers is) does still allow you to override the ABW black box and use profiles to print with the ABW pipeline (less colour ink, better DMax).