Patent ID: 8336980

Claim:
An image recording apparatus, comprising: a recording head which has at least one row of recording elements arranged at a prescribed arrangement interval in a sub-scanning direction; a scanning device which moves the recording head in a main scanning direction so as to perform recording of a same main scanning line by means of a plurality of scans in the main scanning direction with respect to a recording medium; a conveyance device which conveys the recording head and the recording medium relatively to each other in the sub-scanning direction; a recording control device which controls the recording head to perform recording by using at least two of the recording elements in the recording of the same main scanning line; a recording element selection device which selects a combination of the recording elements to perform recording of the same main scanning line in accordance with a status of each of the recording elements; and a conveyance control device which determines a combination of feed amounts in the sub-scanning direction corresponding to the combination of the recording elements selected by the recording element selection device and controls the conveyance device in accordance with the determined combination of feed amounts in the sub-scanning direction, wherein, where s is a number of multiple passes which is a number of recording actions on the same main scanning line, D is an arrangement density of the recording elements expressed as a number of the recording elements per unit length, and k is a ratio of a recording density in the sub-scanning direction with respect to the arrangement density D of the recording elements, the conveyance control device controls the conveyance device in such a manner that at least one of the recording head and the recording medium is moved by repeating a sub-scanning sequence constituted of s×k movements in the sub-scanning direction, and a remainder that is obtained by multiplying a total amount of movement to each of the s×k movements in the sub-scanning direction by the arrangement density D of the recording elements and multiplying a resulting product by the recording density ratio k, and then dividing a resulting product by the recording density ratio k, becomes a combination of values from 0 to k−1 that are equal in number to the number of multiple passes s.