Abstract
We have been studying the characteristics of laser dye transfer printing which produces continuous tone images with high resolution. This paper describes the priniting experiments and numerical calculations to clarify the transfer mechanism of a color dye in the ink layer, which dominates the characteristics of tone reproduction.
We have observed the increasing in gamma of tone reproduction with thicker ink layers. We have confirmed that the dye in the bulk of the ink layer was transferred, using the ink sheet with a laser light absorbing layer and two co1or dye layers on a substrate. From these experimental results, we have introduced the simple model on the dye transfer process. Simulation results almost agree with the characteristics of tone reproduction which depend on the thickness of the ink layer.
