Wonder if our wide format printers are doing this too

[victor bogdanov]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

I know my canon colorado and epson printers send job data to the manufacturers, wouldn't be surprised if they're also putting secret identification info on the prints.

Interesting article

 

[Johnny Best]

In Idia they put a dot on the woman’s forehead, must be for identification?

 

[Smoke_Jaguar]

As far as I know, the project was long since abandoned since it was made public. Not seen it on printers since around 2006, but I have by no means done definitive testing.

 

[bpp]

Yeah, these tracking dots are still a thing with digital color toner printers. We ran into them years ago when we started sleeking. Foil wouldn’t stick right when printing black in color mode because it wasn’t pure black—it used CMYK toner, and that messed things up. Once we switched to 100% black only, the foil worked fine.

We were told back then that those dots were part of a government system to track printers in case someone tried printing fake money. With wide format printers, I doubt they’d bother including this since that’s not how currency is printed anyway.