Patent ID: 8724157

Claim:
A printing apparatus comprising: a print head movable with respect to a sheet, the print head having a plurality of nozzle arrays; a print buffer configured to store image data for printing with the print head, the print buffer having a plurality of regions each including sub-regions corresponding to each of the plurality of nozzle arrays; a first unit configured to receive sequentially a plurality of block data from a host device, each block data containing plurality sets of compressed data corresponding to one nozzle array and a color change code representing an end of the corresponding compressed data, the first unit forming decompressed data from the compressed data and converting the decompressed data from a raster format into a column format to form the image data, wherein the first unit generates a signal when the color change code is detected; and a second unit configured to control storage of the image data formed from one of the block data to one of the regions in the print buffer, the second unit changing the sub-region where the image data is to be stored in response to generation of the signal.