Wifi printer will not print in colour - SOLVED

[Andy_Power]

Hello Forum

I am posting this SOLVED - SOLUTION because it was I found snippets on this forum that eventually enabled me to cure my printing issue and it is really, really frustrating and I hope this will help many others.

It seems lots of people have has the same issue and HP and Microsoft between them seem to have ruined working drivers for mature printers and HP support generally just gives out copy and paste answers that add no value - such as just re-installing drivers over and over even though this does not clear the issue most times.

So the symptom is that the wireless (Wifi attached) HP printer will only print in monochrome or black & white.  In fact there is no button in the printer preferences to even select colour.

When trying to print a photo I would select colour and after trying to change from monochrome it would come up the error: color was changed to monochrome because of a conflict with another printer setting.  

Lots of other people got exactly the same thing,

From PowerPoint selecting colour would actually crash the application.

After trawling many many answers I found that someone had plugged their printer back into the USB port and sure enough the printer installs itself quickly and can then you can select and print colour.  I did the same and sure enough I could select colour printing in the preferences.  Luckily I had kept my USB printer cable.

I also found that I could print in colour from my iPhone so this pretty conclusively proved that that the issue is the printer driver over Wifi.  If fact even the printer test page over wifi would print in black & white

The standard advice from HP on this forum given over and again is to diligently clean out all the drivers and re-install them.  I did this many times with no success.  Then finally I saw a reference to installing the printer by clicking on the TCP/IP address option and boom - finally after days of real pain this solved the problem.

Go to Settings-> Printers & Scanners -> Add a printer or scanner

Click my printer is not listed 

Click Add a printer using a TCP/IP address or hostname

Enter the TCP/IP address of your printer 

You can get the TCP/IP address from the menu system on the printer - in the wireless settings - it will be something like 192.168.1.182 

When I entered this my printer quickly installed and finally I was able to select colour in the preferences.

So my recommendation is if you cannot print colour over wifi first check if your can print colour from another device such as an iPhone.  Next try a USB connection.  Then try the TCP/IP installation method. 

I hope this helps many other people and I hope HP can provide better drivers in future to save us all wasting so much time just to print in colour.  They slavishly promote instant ink each time you re-install the drivers - and left to their own advice on drivers I would never ever need another colour cartridge again.

Andy, UK