Can you give us a brief history of Sawgrass Technologies and “Hybrid” Sublimation?
Sawgrass Systems, the inventors of “Hybrid Sublimation” was founded in 1988. In 1990, using Seiko printers, their technology first supported thermal wax printing using a sublimation print ribbon to produce an image. The ribbon was usually about 500 feet long and made of a series of three panels; yellow, magenta and cyan. Sublimation dye was suspended in the wax on the ribbon. When the image was printed, a sheet of paper was fed into the printer where it was aligned with the yellow panel. The yellow panel and the paper were then passed beneath the thermal print head, which caused small dots of ink to be placed on the paper. The same thing happened with both the magenta and cyan panels. Mixing of the three colors produced a full color image ready to be sublimated. Sawgrass supported a second thermal wax printer with the release of the PowerPrint ribbon for the Fargo PrimeraPro printer in 1995. In October ’96, Sawgrass released the SubliJet ink cartridges designed to work with the Epson S
