Patent ID: 8567778

Claim:
A sheet feeder, comprising: a sheet placing table for receiving sheets thereon; a rotary body which is movable in a vertical direction, which comes into contact with an uppermost sheet on the sheet placing table, and which rotates to send out sheets from the sheet placing table; a sheet placement detection portion for detecting placement of sheets on the sheet placing table; an upper limit detection portion for detecting that the rotary body is in an upper limit position; a transport detection portion for detecting transport of sheets, the transport detection portion being disposed on a downstream side in a sheet transport direction with respect to the sheet placing table; a memory portion for storing data indicating whether the sheet feeder is in a sheet feeding restriction state in which sheet feeding restriction should be imposed; and a control part which rotates the rotary body so as to perform a sheet feeding operation regardless of a detection state of the upper limit detection portion when sheets are first set on the sheet placing table, wherein when the control part determines that a non-feed jam has occurred when the transport detection portion detects no sheet arriving, the control part stops rotating the rotary body by determining that the sheet feeder is brought into the sheet feeding restriction state when sheets are again set on the sheet placing table and the upper limit detection portion detects that the rotary body is in the upper limit position, and wherein, when sheets are again set on the sheet placing table, the control part rotates the rotary body when the upper limit detection portion detects that the rotary body is not in the upper limit position even when the memory portion stores data indicating that the sheet feeder is in the sheet feeding restriction state, and deletes the data indicating that the sheet feeder is in the sheet feeding restriction state from the memory portion when the sheet feeding operation is completed without causing a non-feed jam.