Printer not printing color from desktop (works fine from phone)

[LA213]

my printer will not print in color from any computer (both pc) but will print in color from my iphone.  (my desktop has windows 10, my laptop windows 11) The color works fine so it is some weird setting. No color from online document, photos or computer generated word docs. The settings seem to say that it is printing in color. One pdf I printed, when changing the settings, I switched to color from monochrome and it gave an error saying it switched it to monochrome because another setting conflicted with my choice.

[BeemerBiker]

I suspect that Windows is managing your printers and remembering the last setting when you do a quick print.

Set the default to the what your printer does best.  I my case it is PCL 6

Check the properties (preferences) of that default and ensure that color is enabled

I discovered long ago that I let Bill Gates manage my printer it was possible to route a large excel document to a small label printer if I had just recently used the label printer.

[LA213]

My printer does not have a settings page like yours. It looks quite different. I cannot even turn the preferences to black and white only if I wanted to. ( I work with many types of printers at my office and can usually figure this out but this one has me stumped.) I just don’t know where else settings are that would be over riding the ones from Hp.

[BeemerBiker]

I do not know what your office situation is:  Are there any other users with their own PCs?

Some printers have convoluted dialog boxes and you have to dig to find the part that needs to be changed:  What printer is causing the problem?

I am not a network expert but I suspect if a user prints directly to the printer they can mess up only their own print queue.  OTOH if they print to a shared printer and the share resides on your win10 system then they can mess up your system.

I am assuming that the printer is Wi-Fi or hardwired to a modem and all PCs print directly to it and not through a share.

First thing is to not let Windows manage your printers.   The above images I posted were from Win11 but 10 is similar.

In the windows search type in printers and bring up "printers and scanners" and scroll around and ensure windows is not managing..  If windows is managing it remember what someone did and tries to do the same thing the next time.

We now need to find where the color is disabled.  Frequently printer dialog boxes are shown on-line as a lot of users are just word processors (admin assistant, secretary, etc) and Canon, Brother, Dell, HP,  etc, usually have detailed help for these non-geeks.  If I knew your printer model it is likely the setup box can be found immediately otherwise I am guessing.

Every printer has a properties dialog box and usually the properties box had a button to do a report. or test.  If you click the test button and the printout is monochrome then, IMHO, there is a real problem with the printer like out of ink.  The report should be in color and if it is then one of the other printer dialog boxes will probably have a setting to enable / disable color in general usage.  Also look for a driver "reset to default".  This is not the same as a printer reset which is not needed and can mess the WiFi up.

HTH