Home printing

Hi all,

I've just bought a Kodak Easyshare dye-sub printer (pp300) and I'm having a few setup "issues" that I'm hoping someone is going to be able to help me with.

I installed the printer no problem and printed a test print. The image I printed I have just recently had printed at a high-street photolab. I printed exactly the same image without changing anything. The image from the Kodak printer is a lot lighter (especially in the skin tones - they are almost washed out) than the lab print.

I don't have my monitor properly calibrated yet (by eye only, just sorting out a hardware calibration) so I wouldn't like to say which print is correct to what I see on the screen, but which would you think is nearest to the original file? The one from the lab (just a photo-lab in a highstreet chemist) or the one from my printer.

On top of that, does anyone have any suggestions as to the settings for the Kodak printer that I should be using? I'm printing using Photoshop Elements. I noticed in the Kodak driver that there are some options for ICM, but I have no idea what I should set them to.

Any help would be appreciated!

Many thanks,

Nick.