Color thermal printer printing system

Claim 1

In a color thermal printing system including a control circuit having a color correcting unit for performing color correction upon red, green and blue (R, G and B) image data supplied from a selected one of a plurality of different image data sources and a thermal printer arranged to selectively transfer cyan, magenta or yellow (C, M or Y) dye from a dye film into a recording medium on the basis of the color corrected image data from said color correcting unit, wherein said color correcting unit comprises: image data color correcting apparatus for image data sources which selectively receives the image data from one of the image data sources and which possesses a color correcting characteristic for converting the image data which is supplied from the selected image data source into corrected image data having a linear relationship with OD values of a gray scale chart; means for forming C, M and Y signals from the corrected R, G and B signals by respectively taking their inverse; and dye film color correcting apparatus for converting the C, M and Y signals for the respectively selected image data source into print data having a linear relationship with the OD values of the gray scale chart in accordance with the color characteristics of selected dye film.