Thermal Printers

A simple definition for thermal printers is this: the use of heat to produce text and characters onto a specially treated paper susceptible to heat. There are two main types of a thermal printer. First of all, there are thermal printers that use a wax transfer process. Basically, this printer uses an ink comprised of a type of wax. There is a print head that is heated which melts the ink from the colored ribbon onto your paper.

There are thermal printers of this kind that are monochromatic or color. With the color, these thermal printers use three or four colors. Unlike the sublimation printers that use dyes and heat to transfer the color, these thermal printers deposit the ink as tiny dots, so close together so as to create an image. With the wax ink version of thermal printers, no special paper is necessarily needed. However with the second kind of thermal printers like the dye sublimation kind, a special paper or prepped surface is needed for the printing process. The first fax machines used a special paper and thermal technology to “burn” the text and images on there.

Thermal printers have been around for almost half a century and have been used in a variety of applications. These days, you can get thermal printers for yourself. If you burn a lot of CDs like for music or photos, you might want to customize the look of them. With a thermal CD printer, you can. A thermal color CD printer allows you to imprint an image or whatever you want onto your disk using the thermal technology. For the most part, when the thermal image is complete, the transfer does not smear and is water-resistant and will last for many years.

Labels for a thermal printer are a bit different. Typically, when you buy thermal label printers you are going to create barcode labels. With the thermal printers and technology, these barcodes printed will not smear become obstructed so that they stay scanable. This is perfect for equipment and other items that are exposed to the elements or constant handling.