Auto Color Printing B/W Counting as Color Prints

[Printers2IT]

So I have users that want there printers defaulted to color but sometimes they are just printing B/W text from word not anything color but now when we print just normal black and white text it is showing up as a color print on the machine.  I have tried the V3 and V4 Machine Specific and the universal driver v6.8.0 and all three if you open word type one letter in and print with color setting set to Automatic it shows on the machine as a color print.  Is there some setting that needs changed on the printer or something in the driver I can change so that it does not do this?

[Repairatrooper]

Your best option is to setup one driver for monochrome and one for color. On the monochrome printer, go to printer properties, device settings and find installable options.  Scroll down and find a category called device type and select monochrome.

[Printers2IT]

That would not really be a viable solution in my situation.  I have around 50  these printers out there  and not really looking to turn that into 100 especially for something that I know always used to work.  I cant speak to since going to the All White series printers but I know on previous series you could print in auto color, and just a black and white text page and it would only show up as a Black and White printed page much like an MFP will do.  And it would only show up as a color printed page if there was actually color on the page.  So has HP now made this impossible to do or is there just a setting I am missing somewhere?

[Repairatrooper]

What maybe happening is that with autocolor on it is printing composite greyscale not black. There is a setting in driver defaults that specifies print all text black.

[Printers2IT]

So after some more extensive testing the "printing text as black option does not seem to do anything on any driver I test with the M454.  I test ed each of the following drivers and received the same result M453-4 PCL 6 (V3), M453-4 PCL-6 (V4), m253-m254 PCL 6 (v3), m253-m254 PCL-6 (v4), M252 PCL 6, HP Universal Printing PCL 6 v6.4.1, v6.6.0, v6.6.5, and 6.8.0.  However I pulled out an old M254 that we replaced and tried it and all I do is change the port without changing any driver or settings leaving color on automatic and not even selecting "Print text as Black" and on the M254 it counts as a monochrome impression but on the M454 same driver, same settings same page printed counts as a color impression.  Tried updating firmware on the M454 and still received the same result.  I had SHMNTOXXXN001.1906A.00 and went to SHMNTOXXXN002.1924A.00.   I searched through the menus on the printer and can't find any color control settings.  I am pretty convinced at this point it isn't a driver issue but some kind of firmware or internal setting controlling this.  Are there any secondary service settings that control color settings?