Thermal print head from Kyocera supports card printing

Kyocera has developed the new KLE Series thermal printhead for desktop card printers for printing on rigid materials such as ID cards and credit cards or any such plastic cards. The new printhead is capable of 300-dpi, full-color, high-resolution printing at 50mm per second. Kyocera claims this is the industry's highest speed for this type of printhead.

The new printhead employs Kyocera's proprietary double partial glaze (DPG) structure in the real edge head. The DPG structure uses the convex shape of the heat-storage glaze layer to increase thermal efficiency for printing to achieve speeds up to 1.5 times that of the company's conventional real-edge printhead. This series also achieves a high-resolution print quality by using a split structure for the heater.

Kyocera says in recent years the demand for ID cards is growing not only in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, but also in China and India.

Kyocera will begin mass production these printer heads from March 1, 2010.