Patent ID: 6302517
Filing Date: 2001-10-16
Classification: B41J,G06K

Abstract:
A printing apparatus that effects printing by forming dots in a print region on a printing medium, comprising:a print head;a first scan driver which moves at least one of the print head and the printing medium in a first scanning direction;a second scan driver which moves at least one of the print head and the printing medium in a second scanning direction perpendicular to the first scanning direction; anda print head driver which drives the print head to form dots on the printing medium responsive to print image data;wherein the print head includes N number (N being an integer not smaller than 4) of dot forming elements, a minimum element pitch in the second scanning direction between a neighboring pair of the dot forming elements being k.multidot.D (k being an integer; D being a dot pitch corresponding to printing resolution) in the print head, the N number of dot forming elements being classified into M number of dot forming element groups each including N/M number of dot forming elements (M and N/M being integers not smaller than 2), an ith (i being an integer between 1 and (M-1)) dot forming element group and an (i+1)th dot forming element group among the M number of dot forming element groups being offset in the second scanning direction by an inter-group pitch pg.sub.i.multidot.D (pg.sub.i being an integer different from k); andthe first and second scan drivers and the print head driver driving the print head and the printing medium so that the M number of dot forming element groups have identical patterns of dot-formable positions and the identical patterns of the M number of dot forming element groups are shifted from each other to make all dot positions in the print region to be dot-formable.