21 Determining Damaged Regions that Occur on the Printhead of High Speed Thermal Transfer Printers

In this study, determining damaged regions on a print head of thermal transfer printer by image processing methods is presented. The aim of the developed codes is to determine the hurt regions on resistive parts of print heads which are heated during the printing action. Photos which are used in the study are taken by a microscope and the images of resistive parts are compared pixel by pixel. Determining degradations by image processing is useful to establish the reasons of damages rapidly and it can be used for developing heavy duty, long life thermal transfer printers. Also this study can be used in some other studies of graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in areas of determining some problems of thermal transfer printers and solving them.