Patent ID: 8164607

Claim:
A printing apparatus, comprising: a feeding mechanism which feeds a printing medium; a print head having a thermal head in which heating elements are arrayed in a line perpendicular to the traveling direction of the printing medium; a converter which effects a gamma conversion of all or part of image data going to be printed to generate a length of time for which all or part of the heating elements are to be energized; a predicting unit which generates predicted-temperature data by predicting a temperature of the thermal head after the image data is printed on the basis of heat-value data based on the converter-generated data on the length of time for which all or part of the heating elements are energized; a comparator which effects a comparison between the predicted-temperature data and predetermined-heat data; and a controller which causes a reduction in energy to be applied by the thermal head to the printing medium when the predicted-temperature data is greater than the predetermined-temperature data, wherein, the controller slows down the traveling speed of the printing medium fed by the printing medium feeding means while reducing the heat value of the thermal head.