What Are Thermal Printers Used for?
Thermal printers are used for many types of printing but are often mistaken for laser printers or inkjet printers. There are two major types of thermal printers.
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Thermal Impact
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A thermal impact printer uses pins inside the printer to burn images or words onto a special paper that is sensitive to heat.
Thermal Wax-Transfer
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Thermal wax-transfer printers use a ribbon coated in wax that melts words or images onto paper. After the wax cools, it hardens and bonds completely with the paper.
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Barcodes and Labels
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Thermal impact printers are commonly used to print bar codes and labels of various sizes due to their speed and lack of paper jams. Thermal impact printers require no toner or ink, thus reducing the cost of printing a high volume of bar codes or labels.
Faxes
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The first fax machines used thermal impact print technology because it was low cost. The lower resolution of images printed in this way led many people to opt for fax machines that print higher-resolution images, often on plain office paper.
Calculators
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Calculators that typically print on rolls of paper commonly use thermal impact technology.
Photos
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Thermal wax-transfer printers are used to print photos, but inkjet printers are more popular because of the higher quality of the images printed on the latter type of printer.
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