Oh man, this is annoying. I bought a blue LED light today to see the printer dots for myself. As expected, they showed up scattered all over the printed page (see image: black spots are printed dots in the "blank" space of the page illuminated by a blue LED light in a darkened room.) But what REALLY pisses me off is that the dots are also printed on the BACK OF THE PAGE!
You see, I have a duplex color laser printer (HP 4600dn) which can print on both sides of the paper. One of the annoying things I discovered early on with this printer is how it prints single-sided jobs: it actually prints out (what I once believed was) a blank sheet, then sucks it back in the feeder and prints the content on the back of the page. (If you are doing letterhead, you have to put the paper in upside down.) That is annoying in itself.
However, I compared the forensic dots on both sides of a single-sided printed sheet with a blank sheet from the feed tray. The printed sheet has dots on front AND back. The printed side, and the non-printed side have the dots while the blank sheet is just that: blank.
It looks like this sucky paper-tracking scheme has been screwing up single-sheet printing into pulling and pushing paper twice for every single page. I bet the government sent code to each manufacturer (like they did with Adobe Photoshop) and they had to find a way to incorporate it into the printer's firmware and/or drivers. HP decided to print on both sides. How annoying.
If you have a duplex color laser printer, check if the dots are being printed on both sides. Let's see if it's just the HP4600.
