Patent ID: 6987575

Claim:
A method for operation of an electrophotographic printer or copier device in which an optical character generator illuminates a photoconductor with at least one light source, comprising the steps of: generating light encoding data from print data of a print image, the light encoding data respectively contain one of at least three different light encoding values that are allocated to different reference illumination energy values; utilizing the reference illumination energy values for printing when the photoconductor has a predetermined reference discharge characteristic indicating a relationship of illumination energy and potential on the photoconductor; considering a discharge characteristic indicating the relationship of illumination energy and potential on the photoconductor in a balancing event in a definition of corrected illumination energies; determining in a balancing event the corrected illumination energy to be emitted by the character generator respectively for each of said at least three different light encoding values dependent on a deviation of the discharge characteristic from the reference discharge characteristic given a potential that belongs to the reference illumination energy employed according to the reference discharge characteristic given the respective light encoding value, wherein a value of the respective corrected illumination energy deviates all the more from a value of the reference illumination energy belonging to the same light encoding value the greater the deviation of the characteristics from one another is given the potential belonging to the respective light encoding value according to the reference discharge characteristic.