• You can use any third party ink. Want to use some cheap third party ink, or do you want to use some third party archival ink for long life prints? A custom profile will get you accurate prints with any combination of ink and paper.

After reading this, I hope you will have seen how a custom printer profile will help get the best quality print out of your printer. So how do you go about getting a custom profile? Well, you've got three choices :

• Buy some software which creates custom profiles. There is some software out there which can create custom profiles based on charts that you print. Some need you to use a scanner to read in the charts, whilst others rely on you to visually compare the charts. It's better than nothing, but it's not all that precise, and for the cost of the software, you could get a number of your papers accurately profiled.

• Buy a hardware package which creates custom profiles. There's a number of hardware packages out there that use a device called a spectrophotometer to read in the printed charts.