peter thankyou you have precisely answered my question. yes it appears the epson 3880 does come with those profiles you mentioned and they are considered very reliable. also i was looking at an ad for a professional profiling service only the other day. i just needed someone to map all these things out for me and put them in context which you have done in clear simple terms. now i'm ready for the next step. thankyou!
Glad to help. This color management stuff is not nearly as difficult as some people make out. You need to understand what you are doing and follow the instructions, of course. When I set up my workflow last year it took me about an hour to set up color management and my first print was an excellent match to the screen. Based on my experiences, I would offer three bits of advice.
1) You never get a perfect screen/print match simply because a monitor and a print are fundamentally different in how they produce an image. You can, however, get it close enough to make prints come out the way you want (with some experience).
2) Always use soft-proofing. An example of a workflow using soft proofing can be found on my web site (below).
3) Be sure to have either Photoshop (or whatever program you use for printing) OR the printer driver manage colors, never both and never neither.
