Color Printer Question.

I went and printed out a whole mess of my Ukrainian stamp album pages on a color laser printer at work, and, I have to say, they look pretty good.

Well, somehow I skipped 1995. I decided to print them out at home on my Epson inkjet. Well, the colors didn't even come close to matching. The blues were much darker, the yellows were more washed out.

Obviously, I can just print the stuff at work, but what happens when the Ricoh printer dies at work and is replaced by an HP?

Is there some way to preserve color fidelity across different models of color printers?

A very short terse answer is ..... no.
How a colored printed page looks is the result of quite a few factors, any one of which, if changed, can visually impact the result.

Factors include, just to name a few:
.The printer itself - manufacturer, model, even age
.The ink cartridge - manufacturer, differences in ink composition
.The printer driver which formats the printed page. I have seen differences printed from the same printer from two different computers simply because each computer had a different version of the print driver.
.Of course, the type of paper

Years ago, I was a copier operator. I was responsible for three color copier/printers. I discovered that there were major differences between the colors on the computer screen, and the colors on the print, and between the three color copiers. I ended making charts showing how a standard color palette appeared on each printer.

A friend who is a Xerox technician once told me that he knew of graphics shops where the computer screen and printers were all calibrated so that what you saw on screen was what you got from the printer.

A laser printer will typically give you better quality prints than an inkjet.

When I worked in tech support for graphic artists, I would see screens and printers calibrated. But in a standard office environment that is overkill. Funny thing is, same printer, different driver produces different colors. I printed the sheets PCL6 instead of Postscript and the color were different.

Just a limitation of the technology, I guess.