- A printer that uses heat to transfer an impression onto paper. There are two kinds of thermal printers.
- A thermal print head melts wax-based ink from the transfer ribbon onto the paper.When cool, the wax is permanent.
- This type of thermal printer uses an equivalent panel of ink for each page to be printed, no matter if a full page or only one line of print is transferred.
- Monochrome printers have a black page for each page to be printed, while color printers have either three(CMY) or four(CMYK) colored panels for each page.
- Unlike thermal dye transfer printers, also called dye sublimation printers, these printers print images as dots, which means that images must be dithered first.
- As a result, images are not quite photo-realistic, although they are very good.
- The big advantages if these printers over they don't require special paper and they are faster. Direct thermal: A printer that prints the image by burning dots onto coated paper when the paper passes over a line of heating elements.
- Early Fax machines used direct thermal printing.
Thermal wax transfer: A printer that adheres a wax-based ink onto a paper.
