Characteristics of Thermal Transfer Printing by Laser Heating (I)

— Principle of High Definition Printing —

Abstract

A new melt-type thermal transfer printing system which uses focused laser beam instead of a thermal head is investigated. More particularly, using a high-power single-mode laser diode as the light source, a small and simple printing system can be developed. Owing to the high converging property of the laser beam, this system is able to print the high definition images.
This paper reports the analysis of the laser thermal-transfer printing process using the thermal transfer equation of thin film, and evaluation of printing density, energy, experimentally. As a result, we have confirmed that a minimum transfer line width 7.5 μm that corresponds with the resolution of 3,333 dpi,and printing energy about 1.27 J/cm². Favorable results were obtained by printing a standard l mm² sample character.