THERMAL PRINTING APPARATUS AND METHOD

摘要

THERMAL PRINTING APPARATUS AND METHOD A thermal printing apparatus and method are disclosed which allows a plurality of thermal print head elements to remain concurrently active, with each individual element being capable of remaining active for a time duration unique to itself and independent of burn times required by the remaining elements. This individual element burn time control is obtained by the high-speed loading and reloading of the thermal print head shift register, with the contents of the individual shift register cells being the controlling factor. Once the thermal print head element resistances have been dynamically measured, specific energies are derived for each element in the printhead by modulating the on time for each element, thus allowing grey scale printing and the like.