Communicating with Your Printer
Doug Sahlin| February 29, 2008 8:51 pmCalibrating your monitor is essential if you’re going to get good quality prints. As Ken pointed out in his post Calibrating Your Monitor for Reliable Print Expectations, you won’t be able to make accurate decisions regarding your images if your monitor is not calibrated correctly. The other side of the equation for a good self-made print is in the hands of your printer. When your image-editing application hands off the image to your printer, it needs to put down the right ink colors in the proper proportions 
to match the colors you see on your calibrated monitor.
If you use paper supplied by the printer manufacturer, it’s as simple as choosing the right paper choice from the printer dialog box drop-down menu. When you choose the proper paper type, the printer driver tells the printer which color inks in which proportions will match the colors displayed on your monitor. However, if you use 3rd-party papers, the ink absorption rate and chemical composition of the paper will almost always be different than that of similar paper supplied by your printer manufacturer. That raises the question of why you should use 3rd-party papers.
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