US Patent 7319472 Printer and printing method

A direct color thermal printer includes a heating element array for yellow, a heating element array for magenta, and a heating element array for cyan to perform the thermal printing on each of recording areas in color thermosensitive recording paper. When one of the heating element arrays, the heating element array for yellow, for instance, faces a blank area of the color thermosensitive recording paper, the heating element array for yellow starts a blank area recording to thermally print the blank area. Thereby, all of the heating element arrays constantly remain in a state of thermal printing, so that variations in recording density, which is caused by the load fluctuations in the power supply, does not occur.