It makes me wonder about the secret sauce by which the printer driver is interpreting the numbers in this option, because there has to be something akin to a profile for doing so.
I don't believe it's a secret interpretation, the driver either gets sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998) at some point based on which of the two settings the user selects. Then it does what it does to produce CcMmYKk or whatever.
Regardless of the option however, the bottom line emerging from your tests is that both Printer Managed options are inferior to a custom profile with the application managing, but in different ways. Now if you could determine that so readily, one wonders about how Ctein came to believe what he wrote.
I wonder if he does believe it (he asks
If you do this test, please report back here and let us know what you find. It would be nice to have an assemblage of information on which printers work better with printer-managed color and which don't.). He also replied to my post there, asking about soft proofing (seems to have escaped him?).
IF his technique indeed produced a better result than a custom profile, which it doesn't, that be one thing. That it doesn't and you funnel the data into Adobe RGB and can't soft proof, is another. Two major strikes against this idea. But to be fair to him, the article is titled
Are Profiles Obsolete? Hopefully he doesn't believe that.
One thing he writes in his article I'm kind of shocked to read is:
Then there's printing. For printers, you have a custom profile for every paper you use, although you can often get away with one profile for each category of paper (matte, canvas, glossy, etc.).
Say what? Seems far from ideal and again, no possibility to properly soft proof.