Sensitivities of Kodak's Thermal Dye Transfer Prints to Environmental Factors

Abstract

Increasingly, digital photographers employ the thermal dye transfer system to produce their color hard copy prints. The Kodak Professional Ektatherm Xtralife™ three-color ribbon (donor) and receiver in Kodak's kiosk picture making system offers a convenient method for producing durable, long-lasting highquality prints from digital files. This paper will discuss the sensitivities of the Kodak Xtralife system to key environmental factors—light, temperature, relative humidity, and gaseous pollutants. Gathering data to characterize print sensitivity to temperature has proven to be a long process because of the incompatibility of the thermal dye transfer print's physical characteristics with the high end of the temperature range used in accelerated Arrhenius testing. However, reasonable data can be generated if the prints are tested at temperatures near or below the glass transition temperature of the receiver matrix.