Patent ID: 8550587

Claim:
A liquid ejecting apparatus comprising: a head unit that moves in the main scanning direction and in which multiple nozzle rows are arranged in the main scanning direction, each nozzle row including multiple nozzles arranged along the sub scanning direction, which is the direction in which a print medium is transported, and the head unit ejecting liquids whose types differ for each of the nozzle rows from the nozzles toward the print medium; and a control unit that executes bidirectional printing by controlling, based on a mask pattern, the number of times the liquid is ejected from the nozzles in each nozzle row in an outbound pass and an inbound pass of the movement of the head unit in the main scanning direction, wherein in the bidirectional printing, ejection of the liquid from the nozzles in each of the nozzle rows in the outbound pass and the inbound pass and feeding of the print medium in the sub scanning direction by a feed amount that is shorter than the length of the nozzle rows are repeatedly carried out; the mask pattern is set to either a first mask pattern or a second mask pattern based on the type of the liquid; the first mask pattern changes the number of times the liquid is ejected from the nozzles included in the nozzle rows in stages based on the distance of the nozzles from a reference nozzle; and the second mask pattern changes the number of times the liquid is ejected from the nozzles included in the nozzle rows in stages different from the change of the first mask pattern.