While most stories here on About.com Printer / Scanners have to do with color brightness, the expense of buying cartridges, print quality, judging what to buy, and similarly serious topics, there have been some printer-related news stories that have been just plain strange. Here are five of the weirdest.
Sometimes they really are watching you. According to an AP report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has cracked tracking code embedded in documents printed by Xerox DocuColor color laser printers. These codes, which are patterns of yellow dots, are visible with a magnifying glass or under blue dots, and correspond to the printers' serial numbers, and the date and time of printing. The purpose? To help the government track would-be counterfeiters.
You know how you can only play U.S. DVDs on your player and not British discs? That's because that technology has been regionalized -- and it looks like HP has decided that what's good for DVDs is good for them. You can't use ink cartridges from one region in a printer purchased in another, even if it's technically the same printer. An HP rep is quoted as saying that this helps the company better set prices. I would imagine that it also helps the company irritate its customers.
If you're desperate to save money on your Epson ink cartridges -- and you don't mind if your computer looks like it escaped from your local hospital's ER -- then you might want to try the Niagara II Continuous Ink Flow System. This strange-looking contraption uses a special ink cartridge that is attached to an "eternal" inktank that sits at the side of your printer.
At the very least, your printer will never look lonely again.
Okay, here's one of the weirder do-it-yourself projects I've come across: How to turn your old laser printer into a paper shredder. It's a lot of tweaking with hardware, and it's a lot of trouble for something that can be bought for about $40, but if you like playing with electronics in your spare time, this is something you may want to try. (Just don't do it with a printer you plan to print with anytime in the future.)
A British writer who looks at patent applications and pulls out the strangest has picked up one of interest to long-suffering printer ink users: Three inventors from Derbyshire, UK, who think they can extract the carbon from unwanted tires to generate a cheap and plentiful supply of printer ink.
Hey -- whatever floats your boat. (Or your inkjet, as the case may be...)
