Dye sublimination printers

Dye-Sub printers uses heat to melt wax away from a specially coated print ribbon similar to wax thermal printers, except that the heating array in the dye sublimation printer is much more precise and can heat the dyes in the transfer ribbon to one of 256 levels. Page-sized panels (8 1/2 x 11) on the ribbon consist of cyan, magenta and yellow dye. A thermal print head, consisting of thousands of heating elements, capable of precise temperature variations, moves across the transfer ribbon. Heat from the heating elements cause the color on the ribbon to vaporize and diffuse onto the surface of the specially coated paper. Precise temperature variations are responsible for the varying densities of color. The hotter the heating element, the more dye is vaporized and diffused onto the paper's surface. Dye sublimation printers are often identified with the ability to print continuous tone images. Although image quality is an advantage of dye sub printers, they are not as adept at rendering fine such lines as fonts