M254 pale/washed out prints

[SteinerSE]

I recently bought a Color LaserJet M254dw (was originally going to get a 8200 inkjet) and I'm not happy at all with the color reproduction. Colors all seems very washed out and not at all true to the onscreen look of the material (way to light among other things. One very colorful image I had to double check because my initial reaction was that I had printed it in grayscale, but no, it was in color.
In one my experiments I used an online service that converted the pdf source to a jpg image and printed that, and that came much closer to the original image than just printing the original PDF did so I'm thinking it's some kind of driver/settings issue rather than the ability of the printer itself.

Above left is printed directly from the PDF source, the right one is the PDF converted to a JPG and printed and the separate image is the PDF converted to the JPG I printed. Clearly when printed as an image it's much closer to the original and not as washed out. Why can't I get (HOW) the same image correctness and quality when printing directly?
Any advice? Any settings or drivers to change?
I'm printing from Win 10 64bit with the latest drivers package for my printer from HP (PCL6), paper is HP premium matte 32lb (120g)

[Kumar0307]

@SteinerSE, Welcome to the HP Support Community!

Try making a standalone copy and check the print quality to check if this is a hardware issue or a driver issue.

Print a cleaning page from the printer control panel.

1. From the home screen on the printer control panel, swipe the display to the left, and then touch Setup.

2. Touch Service, and then touch Cleaning Page.

3. When prompted, feed one piece of paper into the priority feed slot (Tray 1).

Check the ink levels in the ink toners. Perform step 5 and 6 mentioned in this document.

If the copy works fine, Run HP Print and Scan Doctor to diagnose and fix any driver issue

Click here to download the file. Once downloaded, make sure to run the file to start the installation and click on 'Fix printing'.

Installing the HP Full-featured driver from here amy help

Once downloaded, make sure to run the file to start the installation and follow the on-screen instructions.

Let me know how this goes.

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