Dye Sublimation Photo Printers – Types and Uses

Dye-Sublimation printers are often called Thermal-Dye transfer printers. This type of printers are more suitable for professional photographic printing.

Advantages compared with other printers

Coating protection prevents print degradation by, air, UV light and water.

A big advantage compared with inkjet photo printers is the capability to print a superior range of colors creating a continuous-tone image. They can perfectly reproduce the quality of a print made in conventional photo labs who use silver-halide paper.

Another advantage over inkjet printers is the instant ready to handle prints because the dry process takes place inside the printer. There are no liquid-inks used in printing process, this making the head clogging problem vanished.

Disadvantages

Expensive to purchase;
Support a limited range of print media;
Average performance in black & white prints;
Paper and ribbon very sensitive to impurities and skin oils.

Despite its ‘minor’ drawbacks, most professionals are using these printers for its capability to produce lab quality photographic prints.

Dye-Sublimation technology

They use CMY (cyan magneta yellow) and CMYK (CMY+black) colors to produce prints, but many Dye-Sublimation printers adopted CMYO type, where ‘O’ is an over-coating thin laminate protection to avoid the degradation of the print by air, water and UV light.

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