[Printers] Intro, and some early data

[Seth David Schoen]

> I hope to receive some new data from the EFF that includes the serial number of
> the machine that printed the sample.  With this data I should be able to figure
> out how to extract the serial number from the raw data.

I hope to have time next week to go by one of the FedEx Kinko's
shops that has a Doc 12 and print some test sheets at a known time,
and get ahold of a configuration page with the serial number.

One suggestion we received from a colleague was printing exactly
one page per minute for 10 or 20 minutes in order to see time
increments.  We can do this easily if one of the Kinko's stores has a
self-service Doc 12, but not if we need the Kinko's staff to do it
for us.

The Doc 12 tracking codes look to have perhaps the simplest structure of
any printer's we've looked at, but unfortunately Doc 12s seem to be
relatively rare in the field, and inconvenient to get sample prints
from.  The most popular color lasers seem to be the HP CLJ (which has a
somewhat more complicated dot patter) and the Xerox Phaser (which, until
the most recent models, did not print any yellow dots that we can see).

The new Dell color lasers will probably become popular very quickly
because they're so cheap.  There is a Dell color laser for $389 that
definitely prints yellow dots:

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/print_3000cn

-- 
Seth Schoen
Staff Technologist                                schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    http://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     1 415 436 9333 x107