Thermal transfer printing

[steve30]

I bought a small thermal typewriter off ebay recently. It will either print on to thermal paper, or you can use regular paper, with a thermal transfer ribbon.

It prints fine on thermal paper, but when using the transfer ribbons, the print quality is very poor. I was wondering if this could just be because the ribbons are very old? Unfortunately I don't have any new ones to test.

I've never done much with thermal printers so I don't know much about them.

Thanks
steve30

[SeanB]

Could be old ribbons that have evaporated the Bisophenol A into the air, or a poor spacing between ribbon and paper, or dirt on the print head. Wipe the head with some isopropyl alcohol to clean it, and try again. Check if there is adjustment for platen spacing. They generally give quite good results until the head fails, which typically only occurs after about 100 000km of paper has been through them. I have one for teardown that has a single dead spot on the head, which renders it useless for it's job as a barcode printer. It has done way more than 100 000km of labels though.

[steve30]

Thanks for the reply Sean.

I already cleaned the print head and it didn't make any difference, so I think its the ribbons.