I wrote:
This means there an no premade device specific drivers for your ET-3830.
Should have been:
This means there are no premade device specific profiles for your ET-3830.
This isn't just an Epson thing. All printer manufactures do this.
When we shut down our in home business, we sold off our large, expensive inkjet and laser printers. While we didn't need perfection anymore, I still wanted something that would print decently accurate color.
We skipped inkjet entirely as a choice. They're too much of a headache to use. If they sit too long (like more than a few days), the print head clogs and you then go through a lot of expensive ink trying to clear the head. Laser printers can sit for weeks, even months without using them, and they'll still print the same as the last time you used it.
We wanted an all-in-one (scan, copy, print). After searching around, I first settled on a small, somewhat inexpensive Canon color laser model. And then only after checking the manual and software that came with it to be certain you could turn off all color management. This is an absolute necessity to creating printer profiles that work. But it turned out, the printer hardware itself had color management of its own that you could NOT turn off. It turned out to be impossible to profile.
And that's the catch with all inexpensive color printers. They try to do everything for you to the point where you cannot color manage them.
Sold the Canon and dug deeper on the next search. Everywhere I looked, users had the same complaint on just about every printer out there. Even the more expensive Brother, Canon or HP models. That pushed me back to the only vendor's printer I knew would work - Xerox. The C405 we now have doesn't have quite as good color accuracy as the C505 (or the Phaser 7500N tabloid printer we sold), but it's good enough, and can be properly profiled.
