Patent ID: 8149448

Claim:
A method for creating an image from a document, comprising: receiving image data derived from a document at an imaging device; determining whether any portion of the image data is in an image-ready format that can be directly processed by a marking engine, wherein the determining is performed immediately after the image data is received; if there is a portion of the image data that is not in an image-ready format, converting that portion of the image data to an image-ready format immediately after determining that the portion of the image data is not in an image-ready format; and transmitting the image data in an image-ready format to the marking engine within the imaging device for creation of an image, wherein if the image data is spooled to a nonvolatile storage device at the imaging device, the image data is transmitted to the marking engine before spooling the image data at the imaging device in an image-ready format to the nonvolatile storage device at the imaging device such that the image data is transmitted to the marking engine without a delay by a read/write process of the nonvolatile storage device, wherein once the image data is in an image-ready format, no conversion of the image data occurs before the image data is transmitted to the marking engine or spooled to the nonvolatile storage device.