Characteristics of Thermal Transfer Printing by Laser Heating (IV)

— Study of high definition imaging process —

Abstract

This study examines a new melt-type thermal transfer printing using a focused laser beam as an alternative to conventional thermal-head printing. Our system uses a high-power laser diode as the laser source. We have previously indicated the possibility of high-defintion printing in this method by a number of studies.
In this paper, we investigated the foundamental characteristics of the high definition printing images using the 16-level gray scale of halftone dither and evaluation of 2,032 dpi mono binary printing images, experimentally. As a result, we have confirmed that a favorable tone-reproduction and maximum optical density 1.7 using 8 × 8 dither pattern consist of minimum dot radius 12.5 μm.
Furthemore, we have successfully realized to print high-defintion binary mono images (2048 × 2560 pixels) of 2,032 dpi resolution.