Patent ID: 8033637

Claim:
An image forming apparatus, comprising: a liquid discharge head to discharge droplets of a recording liquid to form an image on a recording medium; a maintenance-and-recovery mechanism to perform a maintenance and recovery operation on the liquid discharge head, the maintenance-and-recovery mechanism comprising: a suction device to suction droplets of the recording liquid from the liquid discharge head, the suctioned droplets being not used for an image forming operation; a control unit to control a suction speed of the suction device; a drain tube to drain the suctioned droplets suctioned by the suction device; and a drain reservoir to store the suctioned droplets drained from the drain tube; and a vibrator unit provided at the end opening of the drain tube to apply vibration to the drain tube, wherein the drain tube is made of an elastic member, wherein the drain tube is inclined relative to an opening portion of the drain reservoir and the control unit controls the suction speed of the suction device to change a drain speed of the suctioned droplets drained from the drain tube.