Patent ID: 6914697

Claim:
A printer receiving and printing print data on one page, the print data being received from a host computer and comprising a plurality of different types of data, the printer comprising: a separation unit separating the print data into separate sets of data according to the different types of data; an image buffer having a plurality of storage locations, each storage location storing one type of data; a storage unit storing each separate set of data in a different one of the storage locations of the image buffer; a plurality of video interfaces independently reading a respective one of the separate sets of data stored in a corresponding storage location of the image buffer; a print data integration circuit integrating the separate sets of data read by the video interfaces; an output mechanism outputting the integrated print data on one page; and a plurality of image processing circuits, each of the image processing circuits applying an image process to the separate set of data read by a corresponding one of the video interfaces, wherein the image process applied by each of the image processing circuits is respectively one of a smoothing process, an intermediate tone process, a low-resolution process, a high-resolution process, a run-length decompression process, and a Lempel-Ziv (LZ) decompression process.