Patent ID: 7436424

Claim:
A light beam scanning apparatus comprising: a light generator generating a scanning light beam; a driver driving the light generator depending on a drive signal to be provided; a distribution circuit distributing data formed of image information at each pixel of each line along a main scan direction of an image to be targeted, into a plurality of channels of data consisting of a plurality of strings of data; a modulating-information producing circuit producing information indicating start and end of modulation for each pixel provided by each string of data distributed by the distribution circuit; a modulation circuit applying the modulation to the data at each pixel belonging to each string of data distributed, by using the start information and the end information produced by the modulating-information producing circuit, whereby a modulated signal is outputted string by string; a synchronization circuit mutually synchronizing the modulated signals from the plurality of strings of data outputted from the modulation circuit; and a synthesis circuit synthesizing the modulated signals from the plurality of strings of data so as to produce the drive signal, the modulated signals being mutually synchronized by the synchronization circuit, wherein the modulating-information producing circuit is a circuit specifying, of a predetermined number of timings within each pixel and produced by dividing each pixel with a given clock, an arbitrary timing as a start position and a further arbitrary timing as an end position, the start position and the end position corresponding to the start information and the end information for the modulation, respectively.