I only meant to try a laser print to get an idea of what "surprises" might show up in the print before having it professionally printed. Many pro printers will charge like $75 per a half hour of tweaking the colors and/or brightness. This happens once you get your - many times paid for - "proof" print. If you aren't happy with it then they charge to fix it the way you want it. Best to try to take care of this as much as possible beforehand and save $$. A laser print or maybe even a good photo print on a very good home printer will show you a lot of things you might not have seen with an uncalibrated monitor.

This can become a real problem with online printers. You could end up spending weeks - and $$ -  having proofs done, sent by mail, rejected and redone. I was lucky in that I found a decent master-printer that was close enough that I could drive there and supervise the print. The first one, he did charge me $65 to tweak the colors and brightness on because my monitor was WAY out of cal and set much too dark. The guy is cool and doesn't make the bulk of his living off of printing but from travelling to art festivals a few times a year and selling his photo-manip pieces and straight photos. Since I was able to go there (he was actually going to let me bring and set up my pc to show him how the print needed to look - lol) I saw how his rig was set up and used Adobe Gamma to very closely duplicate the look on HIS monitor and printer output on my pc at home. Now I just bring a cd and he prints it without tweaking. Except one that he really felt strongly about and tweaked the colors anyhow. He didn't charge me and I agreed that his version was better. Cool old guy!

Rick