Patent ID: 6890060

Claim:
A method for driving a recording head having a plurality of heating elements as driving elements for ejecting ink droplets from a plurality of nozzles, the plurality of heating elements being arranged in a direction substantially perpendicular to the direction of carrying a carried recording medium, the method comprising: a drive signal generating step of generating an element drive signal made of necessary data for forming one dot so as to modulate the diameter of a dot by the number of ink droplets, using one or a plurality of ink droplets for forming one dot, a time-division driving step of dividing the plurality of heating elements into a plurality of blocks, each block consisting of a predetermined number of spatially arranged heating elements of the plurality of heating elements corresponding to the plurality of nozzles, and sequentially driving each set of heating elements simultaneously driven over the respective blocks, in time-divisional manner; and a recording step of ejecting one or a plurality of ink droplets from the nozzles corresponding to the driven heating moments and impacting the ink droplet(s) on the recording medium, thus recording dots made of the ink droplet(s), wherein at the drive signal generating step, record data made up of necessary data for forming one dot is compared with the number of pulses generated for determining the number of said ink droplets to be ejected from the nozzles, and the result of comparison is outputted as the element drive signal, and wherein at the drive signal generating step, the record data is temporally divided into two, and the order of the pulses to be objects of comparison with the former half record dais of the record data divided into two is determined so that a dot to be formed on the recording medium is equivalent to a dot formed by distributing the ink droplets in the direction of carrying the recording medium from a lattice point as the center, which is the position on the recording medium in forming one dot with one said ink droplet.