Plastic card printing systems with temperature and pixel density compensation
AssigneeEntrust Corporation
InventorEthan Yanna
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Thermal printing on plastic cards where the energization of each individually energizable heating element of a thermal printhead is adjusted based on a temperature of the thermal printhead and a density of the pixel to be printed. For each pixel, the printhead temperature and the pixel density of a pixel to be printed are used to adjust the strobe pulse length that energizes the heating element to print that pixel. By compensating for both printhead temperature and pixel density, a tighter tolerance of the resulting printed densities is achieved.
Claims20
A plastic card printing system that prints on a plastic card, comprising:
- a print ribbon supply and a print ribbon take-up;
- a multicolor print ribbon supplied from the print ribbon supply and taken up on the print ribbon take-up, the multicolor print ribbon includes a plurality of dye color panels;
- a thermal printhead having a plurality of individually energizable heating elements;
- a printer controller in communication with the thermal printhead and that generates data to control the energization of the individually energizable heating elements to print an image to be applied to the plastic card;
- for each pixel to be printed, the printer controller generates data to control the energization of the individually energizable heating elements based on a temperature of the thermal printhead and a density of the pixel.
A plastic card printing system, comprising:
- a print ribbon supply and a print ribbon take-up;
- a multicolor print ribbon supplied from the print ribbon supply and taken up on the print ribbon take-up, the multicolor print ribbon includes a plurality of dye color panels;
- a thermal printhead having a plurality of individually energizable heating elements;
- a printer controller in communication with the thermal printhead and that generates data to control the energization of the individually energizable heating elements to print an image to be applied to the plastic card;
- and the printer controller includes at least one field programmable gate array having a data processing speed of at least about 96 MHz.
A method of direct-to-card thermal printing on a plastic card in a plastic card printing system having a thermal printhead with a plurality of individually energizable heating elements, and a multicolor print ribbon that includes a plurality of dye color panels, the method comprising:
- receiving a print request for printing on the plastic card in the plastic card printing system using the thermal printhead and the multicolor print ribbon, the print request including print data;
- processing the print data to, for each pixel to be printed, generate strobe pulse length data used to energize the individually energizable heating elements, where the strobe pulse length data for each pixel factors in a temperature of the thermal printhead and a density of the pixel;
- and
- using the generated strobe pulse length data for each pixel to energize the individually energizable heating elements to transfer dye from the dye color panels and print on the plastic card.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.