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Introduction
Thank you for
choosing the
FARGO
PrimeraPro Color
Printer.
PrimeraPro has
been designed to
provide you with
stunning, high
quality color
output on paper,
transparency film
and even T-shirt
transfer paper. It
offers many
features to make
printing full-color
charts, graphs,
photos,
illustrations, and
monochrome text
very fast, easy
and exciting.
PrimeraPro utilizes two different, yet closely
related printing technologies to achieve its
remarkable outputÑwax thermal transfer and dye-
sublimation.
Wax thermal transfer is a process which uses a wax
based ribbon roll that is partitioned by a number of
consecutive 9" x 14" colored panels. The panels are
grouped in a repeating series of three separate
colors, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (C,M,Y), along
the entire length of the ribbon. A fourth black
panel (C,M,Y,K) is often added along with the
other three colors to achieve prints with a more
dense, or ÒtrueÓ black. PrimeraPro always prints
the yellow panel first, followed by the magenta
panel, the cyan panel, and finally the black panel, if
you are using a four-color ribbon.
As the ribbon and paper pass simultaneously
beneath the print head, the thousands of thermal
elements within the print head melt the waxed-
based ink, thus transferring thousands of tiny
colored dots from the ribbon onto the paper. The
paper makes a separate pass for each colored panel
on the ribbon. By combining the different colored
dots in different combinations (this process is
called ÒditheringÓ), PrimeraPro is able to print an
almost infinite number of different color
combinations.
Dye-sublimation is similar to wax thermal transfer
in that it still involves a three color, three pass
process beneath the same thermal printhead. The
difference, however, lies within the special dye-
sublimation ribbon and paper and in the transfer
process itself. Unlike the wax thermal ribbon, each
colored panel on the dye-sublimation ribbon is
composed of a colored dye rather than a colored
wax based ink. When the dyes on the ribbon are
heated beneath the thermal printhead, they
vaporize and diffuse into the surface of the special
dye receptive paper. By varying the heat intensity of
each thermal element within the printhead, it is
possible for each transferred dot of color to vary in
hue, thus blending one color into the next. The
result? Continuous-tone, photo-realistic color
images.
A. How Your
PrimeraPro Color
Printer Works
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