Kodak Paper

[john_opitz]

<<The Kodak paper made the images look like there were minute cracks in them. The images printed on Epson paper were perfect.>>

That's because the printer is laying down too much ink on that type of paper.
While its the best approach to use that companies' paper stock and ink set for that model and make of printer (remembering the old saying,"mom knows her child best")...........you can try different (third party) papers and inks(You have to leave the house one day!). This is going to be more of a trial and error method.
What's going to affect the output, and this will be for that companies paper stock/ink set to be used as well.

*Media Settings (controls how much ink is applied).
*Printer Driver (for color handling)
*Resolution settings........(sometimes...........inkjets are pretty stable. But they can have impact on output).
*Drying time...........More important than that is to let the ink "cure" into the paper before making color/tone judgements.

No matter if you use a color-managed or non-color managed workflow. The above will have an effect on your output.

[slipchuck]

I have an epson photo 820 and use kodak ultima glossy paper. I profiled my monitor with eye-one display from gretagmacbeth.
I downloaded all the icc profiles for the 820 (there is one for every type of finish that epson sells) and soft proof the output.
I use espon icc for premium glossy prints with kodak ultima paper.
The pictures look exactly as the monitor shows!
great looking prints but I admit I have not used the epson paper in a while because I like the heavy weight of the kodak.
I printed out a kodak color evaluation target from a lab from a cd they sent me and compared it to the kodak target print they sent me as well.
My print was very close to exact as my printer could print (there was some clipping of colors as my printer color garment is smaller that the colors avalible on the kodak target) but visually it was hard to tell the difference between the two.
I think I will try the espon paper next time to compare.

One more thing, I used relative colorimetric rendering intent so the clipped colors stayed as close to true as I could :-)

slipchuck