Abstract
Several studies have been done for a new thermal melt transfer printing method, using focused diode laser light instead of thermal head heating for wax type ink ribbons. Accordingly the Laser Induced Melt Transfer (LIMT) printing system has been developed specially for this application. This LIMT printing system can control the laser light turn on period for every picture cell at any position of image. The digital test images were printed as a gathering of individual picture cell by raster scan operation of this system.
As a result of this experiment, high resolution mono color binary image up to 1900 dpi was obtained. This is difficult to print by current thermal head. The color multilevel gray scale image was also obtained as an over print of three colors (Y, M, C) using the dither method. It is possible to change the printed picture cell size by pulse width modulating of the laser light turn on period. And, the observed printed picture cell size increased with increasing length of the laser light turn on period. Then the full color reproduced image from input picture cell data to output gray scale based on this variable picture cell size was obtained.
This report outlines the basic characteristics behind this LIMT printing method of image reproduction and the related system.
