THERMAL RIBBONS

Welcome to the ALS on-line thermal ribbon store.  We stock a wide range of thermal ribbons from general purpose wax grades, high performance wax/resin grades and pure resin ribbons for specialist applications, all in a wide choice of print widths and matched to your specific label printer model.

How does a Thermal Ribbon work?

Thermal transfer printing is a fast and clean process with no warm-up or cooling time required.  It is not a wet process and the results are instantly dry.  By using a single-pass ribbon, the print is perfect from the start to the very end of a roll, making it the standard for producing barcodes and variable information labels, on-demand.  A thermal transfer label printer produces text, barcodes and graphics by using a fixed low-powered print head which spans the entire width of the print area.  The print head comprises of a single row of thousands of tiny elements ("dots") spaced typically at 8 or 12 dots per millimetre.  Thermal transfer ribbon is a roll of clear plastic film coated on one side with a pigment, or "ink".  Depending on the printing requirements, the coating can be formulated using either wax, resin or a mixture of both.  The thermal transfer ribbon passes over the thermal print head, with the coated side pressed against the label surface.  The element dots which make up the print head are electronically heated up and cooled rapidly by the printer as both the label and ribbon pass under it at the same time.  Speeds of 300mm per second and faster are quite achievable with the right setup.  Over time, thermal print heads will wear out and you will notice this as each element dot stops working, the appearance of lines (actually non-printed lines to be correct) will get increasingly worse.  To prolong the life of your print head it is essential to use a good quality ribbon with a low-friction back coating which minimises wear and also to match the correct ribbon to your printer, so that you can lower the head power and reduce the pressure applied.

1. If you are unsure which thermal ribbon you need please click here.
   
   
2. If you know which ribbon please choose from the list below.
   You will then be taken to a new page where you can check it’s suitability for your printer and choose the width you need.