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Glossary
Thermal Printing
p>To put images onto a blank plastic ID card, most ID badge printers use either dye sublimation or thermal transfer printing. Both processes use a thermal printhead to heat an ID card printer ribbon. Printheads used during the thermal transfer process heat (and melt) ink, while printheads used during dye sublimation printing heat (and vaporize) dye.
Frequently an ID card printer and the ribbon it uses combine both technologies. The identification card industry does this to get a black tone on the finished ID card that is dense. While combining the colors cyan, magenta, and yellow – the dyes used in dye sublimation printing - do produce the color black, it is a sad, grayish black. It does not look good. More importantly, this black contains no carbon - because it is made from dye, rather than ink - and is therefore invisible to some bar code scanners.
Whatever single color of ink a thermal transfer ribbon has – and there are red resin ID card printer ribbons, green, blue, gold, silver – this color can be made to vary in intensity. A black resin ribbon can produce the color gray. But it does so by reducing the number of dots of black that are printed, rather than by actually transferring gray ink. Such pixilated effects produce an image that appears rough and coarse-grained.
Monochrome resin ID printer ribbons are cheaper than the ID printer ribbons that produce multiple colors. ID badge printers that use thermal transfer printing only remain in the ID card industry because of organizations that only need to print text and barcodes.
Quality thermal transfer ID card machines include the Tattoo ID card printer, made by Evolis, and the Datacard SP55 monochrome ID badge printer.
