HP Universal Print Driver - Colour and greyscale issue

[Psymon]

Hi,

We have had the HP UPD since about v4.8, running absolutely fine on our print server which is a virtual 2008R2 (SP1) box hosting both x64 and x86 drivers - we currently have v5.3 on the majority of printers, v5.4 on the re-installs I will mention below.

The appeal of the Universal driver is that we have the ability to configure "Printing Shortcuts" which are all deployed to the user, allowing us to default our printers to duplex and greyscale, and easily allow the end-user to change to any of the options we have deployed. The options we tend to deploy are as follows -

• Mono - single sided printing
• Mono - double sided printing
• Colour - single sided printing
• Colour - double sided printing

Since we have re-installed a few of the printers from scratch, the "Print in greyscale" toggle seems to be ignored in some situations.

Example 1
The default "Printing Shortcut" is set to "Mono - double sided printing" and the user would like to print in colour
The user clicks "Printer Properties" and changes the "Printing Shortcut" to one of the colour options
The visual thumbnail at the top right changes to reflect this (the graph in the thumbnail is now in colour)
The user clicks "OK" to close the properties window, and presses print.
The document comes out in greyscale.....

Example 2
The default "Printing Shortcut" is set to "Colour - double sided printing" and the user would like to print in greyscale
The user clicks "Printer Properties" and changes the "Printing Shortcut" to one of the greyscale options
The visual thumbnail at the top right changes to reflect this (the graph in the thumbnail is now in greyscale)
The user clicks "OK" to close the properties window, and presses print.
The image comes out in colour.....

It seems that the "Print in greyscale" toggle is ignored by the printing shortcuts - and will default back to the option chosen for the default "Printing Shortcut" deployed with the driver - this does not affect the duplex settings, paper settings etc... Just the "Print in greyscale" option. I have tried using the v5.3 driver, the issue is also present.

Anyone else experiencing this issue? I am most likely going to post this on the HP forum as well - see if they are aware of the issue or if it seems to be isolated.

Cheers,
Simon

[Psymon]

In case anyone else uses UPD with a similar setup to us - HP have acknowledged the problem, but a new driver hasn't come out for 7 months (December 2011).

Known Issue of version 5.4:
11760 Color Option selection defined on the Color tab, or through Driver Configuration Utility, saved as a Shortcut in the driver does not retain setting. Example- setting “Print in Grayscale” saved as shortcut name “Print black and white” outputs job in color, preview icon may show as grayscale or color.

I created a post on the HP forum at the time - still no luck with a response - HP Communities - HP UPD - Universal Print Driver - Colour\Greyscale... - Enterprise Business Community

Simon

[Psymon]

Version 5.5.0.12834 was released on 27th June - problem has been fixed
Simon