It’s not commonly known but most brands of printer add metadata to colour prints in the form of very tiny yellow dots that can’t be seen with the naked eye. To view the dots you need to a magnifying glass or high resolution image and you need to adjust the colour channels to emphasize the yellow.
Different brands of printers typically produce different patterns. The most prominently known one is the “Xerox DocuColor” dot pattern which was decoded in 2005. This pattern encodes the printer serial number as well as the date and time the page was printed.
The Xerox pattern is 15×8 grid of dots that appears in a checker board across the entire page.
Many of the playtests have this pattern. With a high-resolution image it can be seen:
(yellow dots highlighted as purple)
The pattern highlighted. The lines cross out vertical columns with no useful information. Using a decoder we can reveal the metadata:
This is the date the page was printed according to the metadata.
The EFF says the year is decoded like this:
- 8: year that page was printed (without century; 2005 is coded as 5)
The dots say 011000 → 24 → 2024
I have checked multiple other cards. The “higher quality” beta playtests mentioned by @linkdu83 here Pokemon Card Prototype Discussion Thread – #348 by linkdu83 appear to have no dots, suggesting a different printer was used (some printers don’t add any dots). I have yet to find a low-quality beta playtest that doesn’t have a similar dot pattern to the above.
Furthermore, when we look at other cards, specifically the signed ones that were witnessed by CGC:
The full images are just high enough resolution to make out the dots:
The column I highlighted matches the 2024 encoding as best as I can tell. It also appears to be the same printer serial number
https://sales-history.fanaticscollect.com/items/PREMIER13649
Likewise for this one.
Improved contrast images from @BANKS is here: Many of the Pokemon playtest cards were likely printed in 2024 – #97 by BANKS and from @ran1n here:
I have summarized what I know so far in this post:
Thanks to @tediorso for suggesting this avenue of investigation.
If you want to contribute more high quality scans so I can continue the investigation please send them my way.
