Thermotransferdrucker
Thermal transfer printers are mainly used for high-quality color printing, such as photo printing.
Here, different colored ink foils are melted and applied to the paper. The thermal transfer printer uses a foil on which there are waxy colors. A line of thermocouples heats the foil spot by spot, melting the ink onto the paper at about 100 degrees Celsius.
A thermal transfer printer works in several passes; it applies the cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) portions one after the other. Since printing can be done on top of each other, there are 8 possible colors (including black and white) for each dot. Since the dots are very small, mixed tones can be produced by rastering (color dithering).
The thermal transfer printing process produces vivid, lightfast colors. Although the costs are significantly lower than those of dye sublimation printing, they are still usually double or triple those of inkjet printing.
TIP: The color ribbons of thermal transfer printers are used only once and therefore contain all printed information, which may call into question data protection.