Patent ID: 6853754

Claim:
A hyperacuity printing system usable to render image data on a photosensitive recording medium, the image data being rendered as an array of pixels across the photosensitive recording medium in both a fastscan direction and an orthogonal slowscan direction, the hyperacuity printing system comprising: an output scanning device having a writing device that writes scan spots on the photosensitive recording medium; transformation circuitry that transforms grayscale input image data into grayscale output image data, and a modulating device that receives the grayscale output image data from the transformation circuitry and that drives the output scanning device by intensity modulating scan spots in accordance with the grayscale output image data, wherein the transformation circuitry includes: a halftoner that renders toneart; a thresholder that renders non-continuous tone data, a resampling fabricator, coupled to the thresholder, that provides information about local rate of change of intensity of scan spots on the photosensitive recording medium in both fastscan and slowscan directions; a segmenter that switches between the thresholder and the halftoner to provide grayscale output image data; an encoder that discards image data corresponding to half of the pixels of the image data and compresses the remaining image data so that data corresponding to two non-continuous tone pixels are compressed into a single compressed-data-bitword; and a data decompressor that decompresses a data in a single compressed-data-bitword to render the two pixels of non-continuous tone data and synthesizes data to render a third pixel of non-continuous tone data, the data decompressor being coupled to the thresholder.