A thermal transfer printer is a printer ink in solid form by heat, melt the PCB material. It is different from printer ink cartridges. There are two distinct types depending on the shape of the ink:
# Solid ink-jet printers’ use rods that had melted. Then using inkjet printhead (as in the ‘liquid ink-jet printers (inkjet ink liquid)), the ink is injected (this catalog does one of these printers also the inkjet printers). This can be directly injected into the material but usually on a “drum” which then transfers the ink to the print material.
# A second group, the ‘true’ thermal transfer printers (thermal transfer printer ‘) push a ribbon bearing the dye, to the board material and the heating elements in the printhead melt the dye on the substrate where necessary. In this process there is contact with the printed material that they print. The latter must be sufficiently flat and smooth to have good results. Often one color is down at a time. Typically, the printhead and the ribbon width of the substrate resulting in a pass can be printed and is found mainly from this process with narrower printers (photo, tag, label, badge and barcode printers). For monochrome images have this printer very quickly. In color printing it is quite a bit slower (unless different printheads are mounted). In contrast with the ribbons of a conventional typewriter or dot matrix printer ribbons can be used only once and one has a relatively large loss of dye in this process is quite expensive. Advantage is that use can be made of spot colors. Depending on the type of dye, there are other applications:
- Sublimation ribbons deliver high photographic quality. This technology is increasingly used in small photo printers.
- Washing ribbons are found mainly in label, barcode printers by the sharp output (important for smaller barcodes and texts), low maintenance and high speed, they are ideal for this. These printers are usually monochromatic.
- Resin ribbons provide very durable (colorfast, waterproof, scratch-proof) prints on adhesive PVC film. This technique is ideal for creating labels.