My default printer is colour, but the default preferences set it to black and white. I've changed the default to colour on my Win7 Professional 64 bit PC, things print in colour from Word, Outlook, Adobe etc. When I open photos in Photo Viewer, they look fine until you go to print, the print preview is b&w and the print comes out b&w. If you look at the print prefs through Photo Viewer, it says b&w, even though if you go through Devices and Printers it says colour. I'm in a corporate environment, this printer is hosted on a print server. All laptops are seeing this problem, running FixIt is not an option. Any ideas? Thanks.

Hi, Check your printer driver settings. Usually if you right click on the printer located in devices and printers, select properties and then navigate to printer preferences. It is possible that the driver may be set to B/W mode only. Some corporate IT admins use this to control the use of color printing. Its a naieve way but some do it. Martin

Please remove the printer from Devices and Printers . Then follow the steps below to install the printer again. Forum FAQ:How to manually add a printer with shipped driver http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/2c055ac8-b79e-4f30-a53d-798e69ed8d2f/Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Arthur, Thanks for the reply. I reinstalled the printer using the method that you linked to and the print/print preview now comes out in colour. Unfortunately, this is a corporate environment where users need to install printers from those listed in the Active Directory so the method in the link won't help me get around the issue. What is the difference between these two methods? I know that I used the same drivers when I just installed as I have added to my print server, it's just that the print server defaults to black and white and I have changed it on my own computer to default to colour. Thanks.

The printer servers may be not Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 computers.Therefore the Windows 7 clients cannot get correct driver from the printer server. The best method to resolve the issue is manually installing drivers on clients. You can consider to allow non-administrator users to install printer drivers by configuring related policy. Configure Computer Policy to Allow Non-Administrators to Install Specific Devices http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725772(WS.10).aspxPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

The fix is to select Print in Windows Photo Viewer, then choose Options at the lower right, just above the Cancel button. Then choose Printer Properties ... turn on color printing in your driver there like you normally would. This is apparently a separate setting from the global settings under Devices & Printers which is what causes the confusion. I was using FileSearchEX to find images and print them and noticed this. However, under Windows Paint it is not an issue ... I guess Paint queries the driver again instead of caching the last setting as Photo Viewer appears to do.