HP Envy 4257 keeps reverting to printing in greyscale

[SharonRMurray]

My HP Envy 4257 is less than 2 years old and has been working perfectly until just now. 

Yesterday  to save ink, I wanted to make a draft print of a page with a lot of colour on it, so set the print quality to draft via the print options in MS Word 365.  The print came out in greyscale which I hadn't expected, but it was the first time I'd used draft and thought that maybe this was the norm.  However, when I tried to change the properties back to normal quality again via MS Word 365, I got some sort of error and MS Word stopped responding. I left it for a while until the print page of Word came back and just pressed the print button, but the print out was still in greyscale. I went through this process once more with exactly the same results. 

Today I checked the printer properties vi a the Windows Settings dialogue - it showed it was set to print normal quality, but when I tried again all I got was greyscale.

The colour cartrdige was low - not so low I would have thought it necessary to replace, but I did anyway - still no colour prints.

I tried the desktop troubleshooter which didn't find any problems, and then the Virtuak Support Agent which eventually lead me to re-install the printer after downloading the latest driver. Success!  3 pages with colour! 

After a break I came back to do some printing and guess what - back to greyscale again! NO error messages anywere, prinetr properties say it's set to normal printing. Nowhere can I find any option to switch greyscale / colour on or off. 

Also, as an aside, since the re-indtall, MS Word 365 isn't recognising the HP Envy as my default printer even though it's set as default in WIndows settings. 

I'm at a loss what to do except re-install the printer again - and no guarantee it'll fix the problem permanently this ti,e. 

I would welcome some advice on what else I can do to fix this problem. 

Thank you,

Sharon

[SharonRMurray]

I managed to repeat the problem that may have caused my printing issues by choosing draft printing quality via MS Word again and the next time I clicked on printer properties to go back to normal quality, also via Word I got the error message back up if it means anything to anyone?

Thank you,

Sharon