HP CP2025dn color laser printer only prints black & white

This morning everything worked fine. About noon, things went awry.

First, my router failed. No internet, no printer. By plugging my Ethernet cable directly into the cable modem, I had internet, but not through the router. I took the router to the local computer shop, they hooked it up, no routing. They went into the router with a browser and discovered that all of the configuration settings were gone. For $150 pesos (about six dollars) they reconfigured it and now it appears to be working properly.

But the printer now insists on printing black and white. I can use the controls on the printer itself to print a test page, and it prints in truly glorious color. But if I dig deep enough in the printer properties in Control Panel --> Devices and Settings --> HP Color Laserjet CP2025dn --> Properties I get what you see in the attachment. I have spent a lot of time looking through all the settings I could find, and can find nothing that allows me to set Color: to Yes instead of No.

I don't know if the two problems (router and no color) are related. I am also curious about what could have happened with the router (WRT54GL) to cause it to lose its configuration. Should I be looking for a replacement?

FWIW, the "HP Universal Printing PCL 6" driver seems to be the best one for the CP2025 series printers. It has worked for me for several years across several different computers.

What should I try next?

tanstaafl.

I fumbled around with it for a while, gave up and went to bed, and this morning in desperation I deleted all printers from the system and used the "Add Printer" wizard in Windows 10 to reinstall it.

The first time, I told it to use the existing driver, the printer installed and printed black and white only.

I deleted the printer, did the reinstall thing and told it to use a different driver. The printer installed, and now prints in color.

I don't know where the "different" driver came from, I think it is the same PCL-6 driver I have always used. It didn't take long enough for the computer to have downloaded a new driver from somewhere, so does Windows 10 have a reservoir of drivers built in that it installs as needed?

At a guess (reinforced by invincible ignorance) whatever wiped the configuration settings from my router also corrupted the print driver. At least everything is working. For now, anyway...

My printer can connect via USB as well as through the Ethernet network. Can I install it both ways, so I can select which way I want to print?

tanstaafl.

I will just add an anecdote about the PCL 6 version 6.0 driver built in to Windows 10 and an HP CP3525x on the network. It sucks and/or is broken.

I could not get the built-in driver to poll the printer for its configuration (number of trays, duplex, etc.). Manually entering the configuration was also posing some problems that I can't remember at the moment. Printing from InDesign would print some elements in color, and some in grayscale (on the same page). I don't know what the hell that was about.

The PCL 6 v6.1.0 driver obtained from HP's site actually works properly.


This should work. You will need the printer listed twice in "Devices and Printers" (one on the USB port and one on the network port). You can then rename them so you know which is which.