HP DJ 5850 - Win 7 driver (DJ5600) no greyscale printing [ Edited ]

[jonathan9]

Printer - HP DeskJet 5850 OS - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP-1

Our network connected HP DeskJet 5850 doesn't have a native Win 7 driver available, HP suggest the DeskJet 5600 driver.

This installed fine via Windows update drivers via a TCP port, actual driver listed as "hp deskjet 5600 series (HPA)". Printing works fine, expect, when selecting Print In Greyscale on the Printing Prefs "Color" tab (either High Quality, Black Ink only etc), the output is still always in colour, not greyscale. The document icon in the driver changes to greyscale, but the actual output doesn't, it's always in colour!

It doesn't matter whether you print in normal to fast draft quality, the output is always in colour not greyscale. We use this otion a lot for draft docs, and now it's wasting colour.

We don't have this problem in XP or OS X with the proper 5850 driver, the printer is networked to all machines.

Printer is connected via Ethernet to a TCP port, all working correctly.

[jonathan9]

Does anyone have a solution to this, I've spent a fortune on HP products over the years and cannot find the answer to this annoying problem anywhere!

[jonathan9]

The solution (no thanks to absolutely hopeless HP), is to use the 5900 driver, NOT the inferior driver HP suggest on their website. I wonder if HP suggest using an inferior driver to lose features and "encourage" you to upgrade to a new device... What a shame HP have turned into such a shambles. We purchased an Officejet Pro 8000 as another network device which was useless and that had to be returned too. HP = nil point.