Abstract

A major advance in the field of thermal printing was the introduction of the QuietwriterR marketed by IBM which is based on resistive ribbon and utilizes the most advanced thermal printing technology. This printing technology is also termed Resistive Ribbon Thermal Transfer (R2T2) printing (1), because it is based on an electrically conductive ribbon. A recent detailed review of resistive ribbon printing is provided in ref. 2. In conventional thermal printing processes (3), the gating factor for the speed is the time it takes for the print head to cool down between cycles. Due to this limitation, the printing cycle for each successive printing element is about 2m seconds. A further drawback of this thermal printing technology, is the dependence of print quality on the type of paper used requiring very smooth paper for reasonable quality printing. This is probably due to inadequate heating of the ink resulting in high melt viscosity and consequently poor ink flow from ribbon to paper. This problem is alleviated in resistive printing where ink transfer temperatures are much higher than in the case of thermal head printing (4). In this technology the ink reaches temperatures far above the melting point of the ink. This is achieved by pumping enough energy into the ribbon to reach the necessary threshold temperature. however, there is a practical limit to the energy that the ribbon can withstand in a certain pulse without undergoing decomposition. Therefore, a need was recognized for approaches to improve thermal printing efficiency while minimizing the input energy requirement.© (1991) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

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