Patent ID: 7605950
Filing Date: 2009-10-20
Classification: H04N

Abstract:
1. A printing apparatus comprising: a print head comprising a plurality of print control sections arranged along a main scanning direction, wherein the print head and a printing material is movable relative to each other in a sub scanning direction perpendicular to the main scanning direction, and said print control sections being controllable during the relative movement of the print head and the printing material, based on print data that has been set in the print control sections of the print head to create a test chart; a scanner for obtaining scanning data by scanning the test chart; and a correction data generation means for setting correction data for the print control sections according to the scanning data; and wherein the test chart is generated by setting a plurality of printing materials, which have a dimension shorter than a printable region of the print head in the main scanning direction, in different positions in the main scanning direction of the print head; and wherein the correction data generation means is operable to execute: overlapping region extracting process for extracting overlapping regions from the scanning data of the test chart set as a reference chart and the scanning data of the test chart set as a correction target chart from among a plurality of the test charts; tendency correcting process for obtaining tendency in variation in density in the main scanning direction of the correction target chart with respect to the reference chart in the overlapping regions extracted in the overlapping region extracting process and correcting a density of the tendency in variation; combining process for joining scanning data of the correction target chart corrected by the tendency correcting process and scanning data of the reference chart together to generate combined scanning data; and correction data generating process for generating the correction data from the combined scanning data generated by the combining process.