Questions about printing pictures and image processing on thermal printers

[bancroft]

I intend to use a microcontroller to make a portable thermal printer, cell phones to transmit pictures, the microcontroller will receive the data processing and print by the thermal print head.
But the image processing has become a major difficulty - how to convert the general color picture data into thermal printer point set data? What else do I need to learn?

 

[Harald Kapp]

Scale the image to match the dimensions of the printable area.
Convert the color image to gray-scale.
Dither the image to represent gray scale as a pattern of dots of different density.

 

[hevans1944]

Maybe buy one of these, take it apart, reverse engineer it, then maybe duplicate the functionality. Thermal paper for imaging? Not my first choice.