4 ms·
That needs a citation or a sarcasm tag.
by anc84 9y ago
That needs a citation or a sarcasm tag.
- mcv 9y agoDoes an anecdote count? My Samsung refuses to print b&w when a color cartridge is empty.
- dom0 9y agoI heard that before, I think it's a tactic to bully people into buying more ink they don't need. Ensuring tracking dots is maybe just an unfortunate side effect.
- josefx 9y agoMost likely it tries to print rich black, which uses color to make the b&w printout look better ( and use up all that costly color). You can disable that in your printer settings with most printers.
- dspillett 9y agoI've always assumed that is just lazy design (some resources that _might_ be needed are unavailable, report and refuse to print withut checking if they are actually needed for the current job) rather than due to a security (or even ink selling) measure. I've seen the behaviour as far back as the first colour photocopier I ever used.
- seszett 9y agoI've seen that as well a long time ago on a black+red photocopier, no yellow and probably no tracking patterns since red would have been quite visible.
- anc84 9y agoNo, the thing happening does not count as proof why it is happening. Printers refusing to print bw is widely known.
- mort96 9y agoI would also be interested in a citation, but it does make sense; if tracking dots is well known (which they are), and it was easy to circumvent by just removing yellow toner, anyone somewhat technically adept would just remove their toner before printing their illegal documents.
- schoen 9y agoThis makes less sense than you might think because the original motivation from the government side was tracing counterfeit currency, not tracking all documents. Printing convincing counterfeit currency without yellow toner would be a challenge! However, the governments did not succeed in limiting their technology to use in counterfeiting investigations, and may not even have attempted to do so.
- razorunreal 9y agoIf that's true that just makes me angrier because a far better solution would be to improve the currency, like Canada and many other countries did long ago.