Abstract: An area gradation control device and method for a thermal printing thermosensitive recorder, such as a color video printer or a facsimile, performs a printing operation by converting color-corrected and gamma-corrected data into area gradation signals. One bit among 8-bit data is sequentially selected according to gradations and transmitted to a thermal printing head, and strobe pulses whose number corresponds to the weight value of each bit are provided to the thermal printing head for each time a selected significant bit is provided to the thermal printing head, so that dye deposition is uniformly performed over the overall area of a pixel with a high data processing speed.