Good printing on cheap paper..

can be acheived, if not easily then with a little bit of work looking deep into your print dialogue box.  I let Photoshop handle all the colour when I'm printing and not the printer manufacturers settings. I know that ICC profiles are a sticky wicket to bat on rendered completetely useless if you go and stick some cheapo ink off ebay into your machine and if you use an incorrect colourspace and then not specify the right type of paper and finish....I know why people use labs...but even then you'll need a calibrated screen and have your files to be printed profiled to the printers....I can see why just having stuff online is so bloody easy.
Lots of companies have ICC profiles that you can download, so your colour space/printer/paper combo should be covered..here's what Hahnemuehle have provided .
I've been printing off bundles of photo montage images to stick in Christmas cards and it's only the cheapest of the cheap Tesco paper but I thought I'd just have a riffle through different colour spaces when printing.

So I let Photoshop handle everything in the drop down, then looked at what colour profile I'd saved the file in, found that in the next drop down and ended up with really good prints on crap paper...and this was on my ip6700 which is stuffed with ebay's finest inks so when i switched to my Pixma 9500 mk11 which has Canon Lucia ink, the results took another step upwards.
Conclusions, well get the right profile, use manufacturers inks, top quality paper and take time to get to know your print dialogue box and printing from home will become a pleasure not a pain....