Patent ID: 8540342

Claim:
A recording apparatus comprising: a conveyance mechanism which conveys a recording medium in a conveyance direction; a liquid ejection head including a plurality of ejection ports which eject droplets toward the recording medium conveyed by the conveyance mechanism, to produce image dots, and which are arranged at intervals commensurate with a first resolution in a direction orthogonal to the conveyance direction; an image data storage which stores image data showing, in a recording area defined in the recording medium, positions of image dots produced at intervals commensurate with the first resolution in the orthogonal direction and a second resolution in the conveyance direction; a flushing area size storage which stores the number of virtual pixels arranged in the conveyance direction in a virtual flushing area in which a flushing area is represented in a virtual space, wherein the flushing area occupies a whole area of the recording area in the orthogonal direction and occupies at least a part of the recording area in the conveyance direction, and the flushing area includes a plurality of element rows having spatial elements arranged in the conveyance direction, the plurality of element rows being arranged in the orthogonal direction; a standard flushing data storage which stores standard flushing data showing a standard flushing pattern within a standard area, wherein the standard area includes a plurality of element rows having spatial elements arranged in the conveyance direction and has the same matrix shape as the virtual flushing area, and the standard flushing pattern includes flushing coordinate elements which are selected at least one from the spatial elements of each of the element rows of the standard area; a reference area formation unit which repeatedly arranges the plural standard areas in at least one of the conveyance direction and the orthogonal direction to form a reference area; an extraction unit which virtually arranges the virtual flushing area on an arbitrary position within the reference area, and selects the element row, in which the image dot is not included, from the element rows of the flushing area when the recording area is arranged on the flushing area, and extracts the coordinate element within the reference area in the selected element row as a flushing element; and an ejection controller which controls the ejection ports to eject droplets based on the image data and the flushing element extracted by the extraction unit.