Patent Document ID: 4724446
Application ID: 06821954
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A thermal transfer printing apparatus comprising: a thermal head comprised of a plurality of heating members aligned in line, each of said heating members transferring an ink to printing paper upon being heated so as to form one dot, said thermal head moving relative to the printing paper and defining a pixel using m.times.n printing dots (m, n: positive integers); multilevel dot pattern generating means for storing several binary dot patterns having predetermined dots of the m.times.n dot matrix, and for selecting, upon reception of an image signal indicating the density of each pixel, a binary dot pattern in accordance with the density of each pixel upon reception of an image signal indicating the density of each pixel, determining multilevel data for each dot constituting the selected pattern in accordance with the density of each pixel, and generating the multilevel dot pattern in which the data for each dot is determined; and driving means, connected between said multilevel dot pattern generating means and said thermal head, for heating, in correspondence with a multilevel dot pattern, the heating member corresponding to he dot therein so as to transfer an ink onto the printing paper to form a dot pattern of one block having an area that accords with the density of each pixel.