Effect of the Real Contact Area on the Optical Density of Dye Sublimation Printer

Abstract

The printing method of the dye sublimation printer is to push and heat a dye-based ribbon by a thermal print head, and transfer the dyes to desired positions on a printing paper. From the view point of energy saving the load as low as possible is desired for the dye sublimation printer because the lower normal load reduces total friction in the printer. However, the image quality printed on the printing paper became worse when the applied load was reduced. Thus an estimation method of determining the optimum load must be established. In this paper the dyes on the ribbon were assumed to be transferred and diffused to the paper at real contact area. Thus real contact area of three different types of papers against an optical prism was measured with a contact microscope. As a result, the correlations between the optical density and the real contact area were experimentally obtained. The optimum loads for the thermal print head were predicted from a viewpoint of real contact area.