Patent ID: 8804150

Claim:
An image forming apparatus including a plurality of optical scanning devices arranged in correspondence with a plurality of photoconductors, configured to scan the corresponding photoconductors with laser light, comprising: an optical scanning device including a light source for emitting laser light, a rotational polygon mirror for reflecting the laser light output from the light source and scanning the photoconductor, a motor for rotating the rotational polygon mirror, and a temperature detector for detecting temperature of the optical scanning device; a job receiver for receiving an execution request of an image forming job; a job executor for executing the image forming job, the execution request of which has been received by the job receiver; an image discriminator for discriminating whether each formation-target image included in the image forming job being executed is a single-color image to be formed using only one of the plurality of optical scanning devices or a multi-color image to be formed using a plurality of ones of the optical scanning devices; a temperature condition judger for judging whether or not a largest temperature difference out of temperature differences between temperature detected by the temperature detector of the one optical scanning device used for the formation of the single-color image and temperatures detected by the temperature detectors of unused optical scanning devices, which are the optical scanning devices except the one optical scanning device, out of the plurality of optical scanning devices satisfies a temperature condition of being larger than a predetermined first temperature difference; and a temperature adjuster for executing a temperature difference reduction process to drive the motor of the one optical scanning device at a second rotating speed slower than a first rotating speed which is a rotating speed during an image forming operation and drive the motors of the unused optical scanning devices at a third rotating speed faster than the second rotating speed if the temperature condition is judged to be satisfied by the temperature condition judger upon the completion of the image forming operation of the single-color image when the formation-target image is discriminated to the single-color image and an image to be formed next is discriminated to the multi-color image by the image discriminator.