Canon Kabushiki Kaisha

Daisaku Ide

Hiroshi Tajika

Hitoshi Nishikori

Takeshi Yazawa

Atsuhiko Masuyama

Akiko Maru

Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Hideaki Takamiya

Yuji Konno

Satoshi Seki

Yoshito Mizoguchi

Fumiko Yano

Tetsuya Ohashi

Kosuke Yamamoto

Jun Yasutani

Yasuo Kotaki

Masao Kato

Ryoji Inoue

Manabu Kanazawa

Hirokazu Kameda

Akitoshi Yamada

Takashi Sato

Norihiro Kawatoko

Nobuyuki Matsumoto

Akihiko Nakatani

Tetsuhiro Nitta

Yoichi Takada

Kiichiro Takahashi

Yutaka Koizumi

Tetsuya Edamura

Shuji Koyama

Toshiyuki Chikuma

Fumihiro Gotoh

Takayuki Ogasahara

Masao Maeda

Junichiro Iri

Hiroyuki Ogino

Masami Kasamoto

Isao Ebisawa

Masanori Ito

Takumi Kaneko

Koichi Osumi

Hiroyuki Kigami

Hajime Nagai

An ink jet printing apparatus is provided which can stir ink efficiently and reduce user stresses by specifying the time for stirring ink in an ink tank. A stir operation that reciprocally moves a carriage for stirring ink in the ink tank is executed in parallel with a suction-based operation of sucking out ink from a cap after a print operation.

Ink jet printing apparatus with ink stirring operation

An object of the present invention is to appropriately dispense treatment fluid to wipers, and to always wipe ejection-orifice formation surfaces in a favorable state regardless of an environmental change and the like. To this end, in the present invention, a treatment-fluid holding portion holds treatment fluid used in a wiping operation of wipers. When the wipers contact the treatment-fluid holding portion, the treatment fluid is transferred to the wipers. In an environment where the treatment fluid is thickened, the wipers with ink dispensed thereto are brought into contact with the treatment-fluid holding portion to supply ink to the treatment-fluid holding portion. Thus, the viscosity of the treatment fluid near a contact portion between the treatment-fluid holding portion and the wipers decreases, and the treatment fluid is sufficiently transferred to the wipers.

Inkjet printing apparatus and method of recovering printing head

By suppressing deviation of dot-formation positions stemming from insufficient accuracy in conveying a printing medium due to eccentricity of a conveying roller, a printed image in which unevenness is less visible is obtained. An accumulated amount of conveyance errors is decreased by narrowing a nozzle-use range and reducing a conveyance amount over an entire printing region according to a mode used for printing an image in which the coverage of a printing medium is low due to a small number of ink colors to be used, for example, a mode used for printing a monochrome image by using a black ink dominantly in all of the density regions.

Ink jet printing apparatus and printing method

The present invention provides an ink jet printing apparatus and a method for controlling an ink jet printing apparatus which, during a non-print operation excluding a print operation, can stir ink at a required time and to a required level according to the state of the ink in the ink tank. During a non-print operation excluding a print operation accompanied by a reciprocal movement of the carriage, a stir operation is executed to stir the ink in the ink tank by reciprocating the carriage according to a stir mode. As the stir mode, one of different modes is set according to an elapsed time from the previous stir operation.

Ink jet printing apparatus and ink jet printing method with stir mode for stir operation of ink tank

Image deterioration due to decrease in transfer amount, which arises when a remaining amount of wetting liquid for wet wiping is decreased, is reduced in an ink-jet printing apparatus. When the remaining amount of the wetting liquid decreases to reach a predetermined amount or less, a wetting liquid tank is moved down, and thereby an intrusion amount of a wiper into a transfer portion is made larger than a standard value. This increases an area of the wiper where the wiper comes into contact with the transfer portion, which allows the transfer amount to be maintained at a substantially same level as the reference value. This enables the transfer amount to be prevented from decreasing when the remaining amount decreases, and the transfer amount almost the same as that in an initial stage to be ensured even in a later stage of an apparatus life time.

Ink-jet printing apparatus and method of controlling ink-jet printing apparatus

An object of this invention is to prevent prolongation of the time taken for a suction recovery operation while suppressing wasteful consumption of ink in the suction recovery operation. An ink-jet printing apparatus includes a plurality of caps which, when a plurality of nozzles of an ink-jet head are divided into a plurality of nozzle groups, are arranged one by one for the respective nozzle groups, and cap the respective nozzle groups, a suction pump which generates a negative pressure in the plurality of caps to suck ink from the plurality of nozzles, and is arranged commonly for the plurality of caps, and a control unit which controls the suction pump so as to make the negative pressure by the suction pump act on all the caps when a common negative pressure is generated in the plurality of caps, and make different negative pressures by the suction pump act sequentially on the plurality of caps when different negative pressures are generated in the respective caps.

Ink-jet printing apparatus, control method therefor, program, and storage medium

The invention provides a configuration capable of judging whether an ink jet head is exchanged or whether it is replaced, and changing an amount of recovery operation when the ink jet head is exchanged or replaced. Thus a recording apparatus capable of avoiding a defective ink supply in case the ink jet head is exchanged or replaced, and not wasting the ink by unnecessarily excessive recovery operation, can be provided.

Ink jet recording apparatus and maintenance method thereof

A plurality of ejection portions are divided into groups, each containing at least one ejection portion, so that the suction-based recovery operation can be performed for each group independently. Since the number of ejection portions contained in each group differs, if an ink flow resistance varies among the different groups, simultaneous suction-based recovery operations can be done by using a common suction pump, without having to sequentially perform the suction-based recovery operations under an optimum pump driving condition. For this purpose, inner diameters of a plurality of ink discharge tubes running from a plurality of cap units, which cap a plurality of print head units having different numbers of ejection portions, to the common pump are differentiated. This allows different flows to be produced in different ink discharge systems, thus generating desirable ink flows for individual ink supply systems.

Ink jet printing apparatus

The present invention provides an ink jet printing apparatus that can print appropriate images by efficiently stirring ink in an ink tank in accordance with its status to homogenize it. When the elapsed time from the end of reciprocation of the carriage is shorter than a specified time, a printing operation is performed after the end of the reciprocation. The number of times that the carriage is reciprocated so as to stir the ink after the printing operation is set in accordance with the number of scans of the carriage during the printing operation.

Ink jet printing apparatus with ink stirring by carriage reciprocation

By suppressing deviation of dot-formation positions stemming from insufficient accuracy in conveying a printing medium due to eccentricity of a conveying roller, a printed image in which unevenness is less visible is obtained. An accumulated amount of conveyance errors is reduced by narrowing a nozzle-use range and by reducing a conveyance amount over an entire printing region according to the number of colors to be used and desired printing quality in printing an image. Moreover, the nozzles used when the nozzle-use range is narrowed are not fixed, and are switched to be used as appropriate. This prevents only certain nozzles from being used concentratedly, and allows all of the nozzles to maintain substantially the same ejection performance.

Mask patterns to be used for multi-pass printing make it possible to make a print with a higher quality at a higher speed. Specifically, by performing a swapping process with adjacency forbiddance, two points in the horizontal direction, or the scanning direction of a printing head, are selected in a buffer in which codes for each scan pass are set depending on printing ratios of a gradation mask. Subsequently, codes are swapped between the two points. By this swap, adjacencies between print permitting areas are eliminated in the mask pattern. As a result, when driving frequencies set for the printing head is kept constant, the scanning speed can be doubled at minimum.

Print data generation method, printing apparatus and method of generating mask

To provide a prepared color separation table for an inkjet printing apparatus that suppresses unevenness due to differences in the color of regular reflected light when a printing medium surface used for printing pigment-based inks is irradiated with light and which can output a high quality image. It is a printing apparatus that can carry out printing using recording materials and when reproducing a color of a predetermined color region using numerous types of the said recording materials with different regular reflected light colors it uses at least one type of the recording materials over the entire area in the predetermined color region.

Apparatus for determining respective amounts of respective recording materials used in reproducing a color defined by color signals

Printing can be properly performed on a print medium other than print media preset in accordance with print modes of a printer. Specifically, when the print medium other than the print media preset in accordance with the print modes is used, patches are printed on the print medium in each combination of the ink ejection amount and the number of passes, and information regarding each evaluation of granularity and banding based on colorimetry of the patches is obtained for each combination of the ink ejection amount and the number of passes. Next, a combination of the maximum ink ejection amount and the maximum number of passes is selected from the combinations that each evaluation of the granularity and the banding satisfies a certain level. Then, a print mode having a combination nearest the combination is selected from the plurality of print modes.

Ink jet printing apparatus and method for selecting print mode

The present invention provides an ink jet printing apparatus and an ink jet printing method which are capable of stabilizing the amount of ink ejection and of printing a high-definition image by selecting a driving condition with heat conductivity of an electrothermal converter being taken into consideration. The heat conductivity from a heater to ink is classified into heater ranks, and, on the basis of the heater rank, a voltage of a drive pulse to be applied to the heater is changed.

Ink jet printing apparatus and ink jet printing method

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Tokyo, Japan

Daisaku Ide