How a thermal sublimation printer works

The working principle of a thermal sublimation printer is to place four solid pigments (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, abbreviated as CMYK) on a rotating drum. This drum is equipped with tens of thousands of semiconductor heating elements. When the temperature of these heating elements rises to a certain level, the solid pigments are directly converted into a gaseous state (the process of a solid becoming a gas without liquefaction is called sublimation, hence the name of this type of printer). The gas is then ejected onto the printing medium. Each semiconductor heating element can be adjusted to 256 temperatures, thereby adjusting the color intensity and achieving a true-color photograph effect with continuous tones. Among all color printers, thermal sublimation printers offer the best output quality.