Well, keep in mind a couple things: First that when you speak of digital printers. there's a fairly big divide between small-format digital, which tends to be color laser technology, and large-format digital, which tends to be inkjet.
Also keep in mind that, for the most part, the point of supplying a client with profiles is soft-proofing, not actual color conversion. Also, if a printer is going to go the route of supplying profiles to a client, the client has to have enough knowledge of color management to use them, and be willing to create enough of a color managed workflow to make using them in any capacity worthwhile.
It's also something of a misconception that any device can be "calibrated" to a specific profile. A machine is calibrated to bring it into a known state, but that state is unique to itself. Once it's calibrated, it can be characterized--an ICC profile. Once it's calibrated and characterized, it can then predictably emulate other devices, which is what, in essence, you're doing when you send a specific digital printer a file in some industry standard working space such as Gracol.
How well the machine is calibrated and how closely its characterization matches how it actually prints will then determine how close it will get to producing images that match the standards of the incoming working space you've sent it.
And that's a reasonable workflow for laser-type machines, as they tend to have gamuts that more-or-less are in the ballpark of the likes of Gracol. But I don't recommend it at all for inkjet. Many large-format machines on many media can deliver pretty close to twice the color gamut of most of the flavor-of-the-month CMYK spaces, but if that's what you send them, and they're calibrated and characterized correctly, that's what they'll reproduce…leaving a whole lot of capability lying on the cutting room floor. So for that reason, the ideal is to get good, solid, first-rate professionally-made profiles, then give them to clients for soft-proofing, and show the clients how to set up a color workflow that will make complete use of their color gamuts.
It's involved, but what you have when you're done is the very definition of a rabidly loyal client.
Mike Adams
Correct Color
