High quality halftone image printing using resistive ribbon thermal transfer printing

One of the challenges of 960 dot-per-inch resistive ribbon thermal transfer - R2T2 - printing is the control of energy delivered to the print head to assure very high fidelity printing. A method of manipulating image data to combat the undesired effects of thermal printing is presented. A brief review is given of some of the unique approaches required to construct a prototype of an inexpensive, near-typesetter-quality, desk-top machine, including techniques for fabricating a 960 dpi. R2T2 print head and a closed-loop paper incrementing technique. Print samples and examples of processed data for printing are presented. © 1989 SPIE.