this is how printers meet crowbars and baseball bats.
Damn it feels good to be a gangster.
looks at ink cart, see’s it’s still got 40% of it’s contents in there - “hey bud there’s still ink-”
“FUCK YOU PAY ME.” – HP Innovation
The reason this happens is to prevent counterfeiting money.
From Snopes:
Do Household Printers Leave an Invisible Tracking Code on All Your Printed Documents?
Mostly true.
What’s True
Numerous brands of color laser printers leave coded metadata in barely perceptible yellow dots that can be used to trace a printed document to its source, a feature originally intended as a deterrent to counterfeiting currency with laser printers.
What’s Undetermined
While a majority of laser printers are designed to produce this secret metadata, it is unclear exactly how many printing companies and models employ the technology.
Iirc even when printing black-and-white and specifically not choosing to print in color, the printer still uses some of the other colors to get a more “true” black. So in order to legit print in just black-and-white, you want a monochrome printer - otherwise, the printer will keep using smaller amounts of other ink for the black colors.
Brother printers can lick my salty nuts for exactly this reason.
It is not brothers fault. It was something they were forced to do.
More generally, I have found Brother to be the least worst printer company.
If you are only printing text, a low end brother laser printer is by far your best option.
If you are printing less than a couple of hundred colour pages a year you are better off going to a print shop to do so as it will be cheaper.
If you are printing more than a couple of hundred colour pages a years look into Epson ecotank printers as they are the most cost effective option.
The printer wouldn’t even scan without ink though.
I’m also not in the USA.
