Characteristics of Thermal Transfer Printing by Laser Heating (III)

— Study of color printing Process —

Abstract

We have been studying the melt-type laser induced thermal transfer printing using a high-power laser diode. In this paper, it is discussed that this laser printing method is suitable to be applied on the full-color printers. There is one important problem that efficiencies of exchanging form energy of laser beam to heat is small for absorption coefficients of color ink layers. This problem could be solved with settling the light absorption layer between polyester film and color ink layers.
As a result of the experiment using a double-1ayer color ink sample, minimum line width was 10 μm that corresponds with the resolution of 2,540 dpi, and printing energy was 0.83 J/cm². This printing method is suspected to be possible to use of the full-color printers.