I have better luck and greater color consistency when I let the "Printer Manage Colors" and not the application I am using. Paper brand is very important in color accuracy. If I gave you five different paper brands you would end up with a different look on each paper. Paper brightness and color saturation is a big variable when printing. Perhaps I still don't know what I'm doing after 20 plus years of messing around with trying to get my prints to match my monitor, but some things I know work best for me and my Canon printer.

Experiment, you will most likely go through a bunch of paper until you find what works best.
Again, good luck.

I love my ET 8550. I have had it for almost two years and I am still on the ink that came with the printer. I use it for greeting cards that I sell in my wife's jewelry booth at the local art walk in the summer. I also make prints for my own enjoyment, but except for the pigment black, the inks are not archival, therefore professional gallery prints are not really an option. I belong to the local arts alliance, and I may display a print or two in their gallery in the future, but mark them NFS (not for sale.) For prints, I like Moab lasal Exhibition Luster 300 with this printer, but it did not come with a profile, so I use the nearest built-in luster profile. For cards, I use Red River Polar Matte, which is profiled for this printer.

You give me a busted unrepairable $1,000 camera and I guarantee I could take it apart without using a sledgehammer. I’ve disassembled and repaired just everything from a diesel engine with a 300 pound crankshaft to a totally disassembled dirt bike engine a guy brought to me in a cardboard box. Repaired air conditioning compressors, 90 pound electric motors, VCRs, repaired my first color TV when I was 16, used a clay flowerpot and 5 gallon bucket to build a furnace to melt down garage door frames and cast and machined an oil cooler fitting for my motorcycle and so on. My biking friends call me MacGyver because I once repaired the charging system on a Harley as traffic whizzed by using a beer can I found along the Massachusetts turnpike. And I can build a barn just as easily as building fine furniture from trees I cut down and sawed up with my mill.

But I can understand you skepticism because some people got it and others don’t. For some people mechanical devices, electricity and hydraulics are black magic with concepts they will never grasp. Not so for me. In fact, often times I wake up at 2-3 AM with the solution to a problem I’ve been working on.

So I already got a very firm grip on a lot of stuff. I do enjoy the banter though. Take care and be well friend!

I’ve been tearing stuff apart since I was a little kid. And putting some of it back together as well. I figure if some person in China can put it together then I can take it apart.

One of those pocket cameras was a Kodak and the other was some kind of cheap Walmart thing (Samsung??). I had some photos of a sensor compared to the tip of a sharpened pencil but I can’t find them now.

Take apart a hard drive sometime, really cool chromed discs, impressive machining on the motor and cute little ball bearings!

Have you ever replaced the printhead on your Pro-100? If it has been used that much, I would think a new printhead is in order. I believe his website is (or was) inkjetprinthead.com. Super nice guy and very informative about printheads. If that head is still available, it will be much less expensive than a new printer.
Also, please don't dump the printer. There are parts (like the solid steel shaft that guides the printhead across the paper) that could be reused by people that are trying to keep this really great printer going!