Patent ID: 6972783

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: a laser array having m light emitting elements in a sub-scanning direction; a data shifter that outputs m lines of image data in the sub-scanning direction for one main scanning period, subsequently reads image data which is a subject of a next output with the image data shifted by n lines in the sub-scanning direction, n being a divisor of m, and repeats said outputting and reading; a driver that drives each light emitting element of said laser array so as to emit a beam, on the basis of the image data which has been outputted from said data shifter; and a scanning unit that causes the beams which are emitted from said laser array to scan in a main scanning direction for said one main scanning period, subsequently moves a scanning start position for a next one main scanning period by said n lines in the sub-scanning direction, and repeats said scanning and moving, wherein the driver scales the intensity of light emitted by each light emitting element substantially by a ratio of n/m.