‘Sublimation’ is something, to cause a change from a solid state into a vapor and then solid again. So, this is essentially the whole procedure of dye-sublimation printers under the hood, which is also known as thermal dye transfer printing. This printer is used primarily for printing out high-quality photos, medical and scientific imaging, high-scale desktop publishing, and any kind of application that requires fine details and rich color regardless of cost and speed. There is also a printer called snapshot printer which uses the dye-sublimation technique but is used solely for printing out photos in a more cost-effective way than their larger-sized counterparts.
CMYK technology
This printer is a good example of a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) color printing technique used. Under the hood, there is a roll of heat-sensitive plastic film that is embedded with page-sized sections of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow dye. There are also plenty of printers that use a black dye as well.
There is a printhead that contains thousands of heating elements, capable of point-to-point temperature control, moving across the film, vaporizing the dyes and causing them to soak into a specially coated paper underneath right before it cools down and reverts to its solid form. This whole process requires one pass on each page for each color. There are also printers that use a final finishing pass to apply a protective laminate coating on the page.
Continuous-tone images
Any document printed through a dye-sublimation process has a unique characteristic to it, known as continuous-tone images. This means that the printed quality is not like one of the pixel quality images, where the print is done based on grid and pixel, but rather done through a layer of dye colors. This directly opposes the other kind of printing technology known as dithered images. Dye-sublimation is incredibly sharp and awe-inspiring that directly challenges the professional photo-lab process.
Dye-sublimation printers are relatively expensive and have varieties of characteristics. There are top manufacturers out there to choose from, like Epson, Canon, HP, Sawgrass, and so on.
In our next article, we would like to present the list of best dye printers out there picked by industrial leading tech savvies, which might be useful for you if you would like to purchase one of such printers for yourself.