Mac OSX 10.5: "Let InDesign Determine Colors" is my only option.

Question

ID 6.0.3
Trying to print to my Epson R2400 inkjet: I'm getting lousy colors and wasting an immense amount of ink toggling all the various options in trying to get a decent print.
"Color Management" has a "Color Handling" dropdown-control but it's stuck on "Let InDesign Determine Colors". I'm sure I'd get better colors with this printer if IT could manage them. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

(A) InDesign's print dialog is where one
is supposed to be able to print from. Saving to another app and
printing from there is counterintuitive and a total waste of time.
(B)
Yet another layer of options and settings to wade through. And print
settings in Acrobat are not, to the best of my knowledge, saved with
the doc.
(C) Yet another file to
store, make room for and keep track of. Not surprisingly, the
print-quality pdf I just created is substantially larger than the .indd
file it originated from.
Im not looking to argue the issue, but instead to maybe shine a different light on this...
(A) Agreed, you should be able to print straight from ID, but its not a waste of time. Quite the opposite. Exporting to PDF lets you FAR more accurately preflight your documents before print as well as (assuming you export using X1a compliance) flatten them properly. MANY times you will have font issues at print, printing from Indesign will leave you blind to these, as well as flattening issues AND spot color issues resulting from converting them outside of the native applications they were created in.
(B) Again, that is one way to look at it. I however see it as the Only print dialogue i ever deal with. I export everything to PDF, (AI, Quark, Indesign, photoshop everything) then print. I only need to know that one dialogue. As for print options, i just save them for different types of printing, jsut a few saved profiles will cover most prints.
(C) Cant argue here. The ID file doesnt inclued all the links so it is MUCH smaller... but also much less portable, compatable etc.
I dont use PDFs to print because i have to, i do it because in my humble opinion, the benefits are just too many to pass up.