C80 color problems

[John Baldi <john.baldi@erols.com>]

Hi,
I've been impressed by the professional topics discussed on this list.
So I'm hopeful someone can help me with my question or two.

Background: I got a C80. Yes it's pretty fast in draft mode, and yes
the ink really is waterproof. So Ok I got the polite stuff out of the
way :)

I am so terribly disappointed with the output quality of this printer,
and I'm so surprised people here are praising it. I know it's not a
professional printer, and I'm not expecting such. I am comparing it to
the quality of my old "600" model printer, which has been given to my
3-year-old because of the irrepairable horizontal banding it now has.

I LOVED printing photos on my "600" - I'd scan it in, spit it back out
(on glossy paper or photo quality ink jet paper - 20 or 24# I think)
using the plain old "automatic" setting on high quality,
and unless you were closer than 6 inches to see the "dots", you'd think
it was an original.

On the C80, I still haven't got a printout as good as from the 600.
I'm not looking for super-photo-quality results, I'm just looking for 
something in the ballpark of the quality I had on my 4 year old Epson.

My very first photo printout was from a party at my work (from a digital
camera not a scan), which featured my daughter with Clifford the Big Red
Dog. On my monitor, I can see the light and dark texture of the
fur on Clifford's red costume. On my printout,
well, my wife said "what did you do, paste a cartoon of clifford on the
page?" - nearly all the texture of the red fur was missing - it was
pure solid red - disgusting!
(You can see this picture at http://users.erols.com/john.baldi/clifford.jpg)
Another picture of a friend's kids, looks like the kids are all
sunburned in the face, but they are not if you look on the screen or if
I print it on my "600".
But it's not only that it's hyper on red/magenta;
another picture of my daughter had her in front of an ivory canopy,
when I print it, the canopy looks grey, and in fact all the colors
are washed out. So it seems I get the opposite effect (lack of color)
on non-red/magenta.

If I tweak things enough I can get a printout that, if I don't
compare it to the original, looks Ok. But when you do put it side-by-side
to the original, you notice that the colors are faded (except for Red),
and colors shifted to red/magenta.
And just forget about glossy paper, don't even waste the
paper or ink. I can live with that, matte is Ok w/ me though it's not
my first preference.

So I've been doing "google" searches (as well as reading the past hundred
or so back digests from this list), and have found, in addition to the
"forget glossy paper" revalation, that I can get "fair" quality output
by going in to the driver, choosing "Custom" Mode from the Main panel,
clicking "Advanced", and then setting my desired DPI and picking
"PhotoEnhance4" from Color Management, and setting "Tone" to "Hard".

Once you get that far into the printer settings, you can see the
abundance of options you can choose. Therein my question:

What's the difference between choosing "PhotoEnhance" from the "Main"
panel vs. going to Custom->Advanced and choosing PhotoEnhance?
I seemed to get better color accuracy albeit much too flat when I was
picking PhotoEnhance and "People" on the pulldown (main panel), but I
got better color brightness (but either too magenta, or skin tones and
tans turned greyish) when going to Custom->Advanced and using
PhotoEnhance4 with Tone Hard.

So I next thought I'd go to Custom->Advanced and choose "Color Controls"
from Color Management, because then I imagined I could adjust the colors to
behave more like the People photoenhance pulldown from the main panel, and/or
reduce the magenta.

At that point I realized I could spend years trying to get this thing
to print correctly. So my question:
Can someone point me to documentation which tells me what the
details of all of the preset/automatic things really mean?
For example,
- when I choose "PhotoEnhance-People" on the Main panel,
what is that really? What DPI? What color adjustments?
- when I choose Advanced->Custom and pick PhotoEnhance4, what's
the difference of Tone Normal vs. Hard vs. Vivid?
- When I'm on Advanced->Custom and pick Color Controls, what's
the difference between Modes Automatic vs. Photo vs. Vivid?
- What is going on when I choose the different paper types exactly?
I know Glossy disables black ink. What's the diff between plain paper
vs. bright white, etc: Max DPI's, ink adjustments, etc.

There must be a million combinations of settings between the different
paper types and the different automatic settings vs. custom settings
and all their possible pull-downs. So I asked a couple specific things
above, and if anyone could answer those, it would be nice, but even
better would be a place which documents what all the possible settings
mean, how they affect the output, etc.

Thanks for listening to this long rant.

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