Printer Setup, Software & Drivers

Hi all,

This is my first post.

Up until two days ago I used an HP Photosmart 7520 for seven years without any issues. I primarily used it for printing art prints on HP Premium Plus Photo Paper 300 GSM and art cards on glossy card 210 GSM. I was up against a print deadline and of course it chose that time to develop a problem!

Long story short, I bought an HP Envy Photo 7134 yesterday to replace it, while I investigate fixing the Photosmart. When printing from the Photosmart on a package like Photoshop you could select the specific paper-type you wanted to use, e.g. HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, HP Premium Paper, HP Advanced Photo Paper, HP Everyday Photo Paper etc. I noticed that the quality of the printout changed depending on which option was selected. You could also see those options in Printer Preferences within Control Panel.

However, there were no options to select paper type with the HP Envy Photo 7134 when using the default driver: 'HP PCL3 A-size Printer Class Driver'. You could only select paper size, and there were about 12 other missing preference options, such as borderless printing. I contacted HP Support via WhatsApp but they didn't know how to resolve the problem. Fortunately, I found this page on the HP site: https://support.hp.com/gb-en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-envy-photo-7100-all-in-one-printer-ser.... I downloaded and installed the driver and borderless printing, along with other options were now available. 

The problem is it still doesn't list out specific HP Photo papers as per the 7520 Photosmart. Instead it just says 'HP Photo Papers'. Therefore, I can't select HP Premium Plus. I believe this is potentially affecting print quality, as the first print I did looked completely washed out, as though I printed it on low quality paper. After installing this driver I contacted HP Support again - this time over the phone. They advised me to download and install the HP Easy Start Printer Setup Software from the 'Software-Utility' section of this page: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-envy-photo-7100-all-in-one-printer-series/907311.... It made no difference to the settings.

A second more worrying problem has also developed. I like to print small versions of the prints first, i.e. proofs on HP Premium Plus Photo paper while I'm finetuning the colour, and then when I'm happy I print a full size A4 version using the same paper. However, what happened today is that the proof looks completely different to the large version. Night and day different. Even though it's the same paper and same settings. Has anyone encountered this before, and if so, how did you fix it?

It is extremely frustrating.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Aaron.