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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Solution/hack: buy one of those ink cartridge refill kits, but put black ink in the yellow cartridge. That way when you want to see the dots they should come up nice and clear?

Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.

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The real solution/hack is to just print your doc at FedEx for 50 cents the three times a year you need something printed

Yep. Last time I thought it'd make sense to have a printer, cause I was printing lots of stuff for a wedding, it ran out of ink oddly quickly then broke soon after I refilled it. Also jammed a lot and wasn't easy to get the right drivers for it.

I forget what I spent, maybe $150 by the end and 4 hours of dealing with it. Never again.

The ink cartridges that come with the printer aren't full, and have never been as far as I can remember. That's one of the reasons a cheap printer costs as little as a set of ink for the same printer (the other obviously being the "give away the razor, sell the blades" business model employed)

I figured it was that, which is why I even bothered buying more ink. Problem is the printer completely died.

Where I live, every 7-11 has an office copier/printer/scanner machine that also does photo printing you can use for a few cents. That's been good enough for my twice-a-year printing needs. It even comes loaded with sticker paper so you can print out custom stickers, pretty fun.

Wouldn't that just ruin the document you were trying to print?

Well, yes. But the OP was suggesting/suspecting his printer prints security dots even when printing in B&W. This could be a good way to reveal them for analysis purposes.

That would permanently destroy the yellow ink path.

I'd imagine it would dilute out, eventually? Maybe after a few head clean cycles. Sounds like an interesting experiment.

Depends, it might take a very long time.

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