Patent ID: 7006419

Claim:
An information recording apparatus for recording information as marks on a recording layer of an optical recording medium by irradiating a laser beam with a light-emission waveform corresponding to a recording pulse, said information recording apparatus comprising: a rotation driving mechanism configured to perform a rotation operation so as to rotate the optical recording medium; a rotation controlling part configured to control the rotation operation according to a specified recording linear velocity; a laser light source configured to emit the laser beam; a light source driving part configured to drive the laser light source to emit the laser beam; a recording pulse generating part configured to generate, as the recording pulse, each of a rectangular pulse comprising a single pulse and a multi-pulse comprising a combination of a leading heating pulse and a succeeding heating pulse; a recording pulse selection part configured to switch between the multi-pulse and the rectangular pulse and to select one of the multi-pulse and the rectangular pulse according to a recording condition, so as to cause the laser light source, via the light source driving part, to emit the laser beam; a recording condition acquiring part configured to read set values of pulse widths and recording powers for the multi-pulse corresponding to a predetermined recording linear velocity for each target optical recording medium, which are pre-formatted as the recording condition; a test write part configured to perform a test write to the optical recording medium with different recording powers at the predetermined recording linear velocity based on the read set values of the pulse widths and the recording powers for the multi-pulse, so as to obtain an optimum recording power for recording with the multi-pulse; and a determining part configured to determine whether or not the optimum recording power obtained by the test write part exceeds a maximum allowable power that is preset with respect to the laser light source and the light source driving part, wherein the recording pulse selection part uses the recording power as the recording condition, and selects the rectangular pulse in place of the multi-pulse when the optimum recording power exceeds the maximum allowable power.