Thermal printers are used to transfer an impression onto paper using heat. There are two types of thermal printers. Direct Thermal Printers and Thermal Wax Transfer printers.

Direct thermal printers use direct heat from elements to burn an image directly onto the page. This was a method originally used in early fax machines and is still an effective method of printing today.

Thermal wax transfer uses a printer that adheres a wax-based ink onto paper. A thermal printhead melts wax-based ink from the transfer ribbon onto the paper. When cool, the wax is permanent. This type of thermal printer uses an equivalent panel of ink for each page to be printed, no matter if a full page or only one line of print is transferred. Monochrome printers have a black page for each page to be printed, while color printers have either three (CMY) or four (CMYK) colored panels for each page. Unlike thermal dye transfer printers , also called dye sublimation printers, these printers print images as dots, which means that images must be dithered first. As a result, images are not quite photo-realistic, although they are very good. The big advantages of these printers over thermal dye transfer printers are that they don’t require special paper and they are faster.

Both of these printers can be used as plastic card printers. PVC card printing is an art unto itself as PVC Cards generally need to be more resilient than conventional paper cards. As a result, special methods usually need to be employed to ensure that the image or information is firmly ingrained on the card but this does mean that these types of cards can typically be used for membership cards and ID cards.

Thermal printing is an exceedingly effective method of ensuring the adherence of your information to the PVC Card as it is both permanent and relatively cost effective.