Lexmark International, Inc.

David William Murphy

Gary Scott Overall

Martin Geoffrey Rivers

Bryan Scott Willett

Allen P Johnson

Ronald Todd Sellers

David Brian Langer

Cuong Manh Hoang

Gregory John Sherwood

Timothy Gerard Yorkey

Martin Joseph Brown, Jr

Christy Mitchell West

A method for adaptively matching print quality and performance in a host based printing system including a host computer connected to a printer via an interface. The method includes the steps of: determining a print process time corresponding to an amount of time for a page to print based on current printer settings of the printer; determining a quantity of data to be transferred from the host computer to the printer; determining a data transfer time corresponding to an amount of time required to transfer the quantity of data from the host computer to the printer via the interface; comparing the print process time to the data transfer time to determine an amount of time that can be used by the printer to improve print quality; and determining optimum printer settings for the printer based at least in part on the amount of time determined in the comparing step.

Method for adaptively matching print quality and performance in a host based printing system

A method of positioning an ink jet printhead in a printer includes dividing a bitmap into a plurality of rows of tiles. A subset of the rows of tiles to be printed in a next pass of the printhead is identified. Printable ones of the tiles in the subset of rows are identified. The printable tiles contain printable data. Within each printable tile, a top most location of the printable data and at least one of a left most location of the printable data and a right most location of the printable data are identified. A print medium is advanced in a feed direction until a portion of the print medium corresponding with the top most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile is substantially aligned with a top nozzle of the printhead. The printhead is moved, in a scan direction, directly to a position on the print medium corresponding to one of the left most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile and the right most location of the printable data of at least one printable tile.

Ink jet swath prediction method

A printer has monochrome and color printing heads for printing color and monochrome images, respectively, and a media feed path for moving sheets of media by the printing heads. The media feed path has a color position in which the color printing heads print color images and the monochrome printing head prints monochrome images, and a monochrome position in which the monochrome printing head prints monochrome images but the color printing heads cannot print color images. A memory stores data on prior print jobs, and a control circuit switches the media feed path from the color position to the monochrome position in response to the data stored in the memory.

Printer with adaptive printing mode

An improved non-stop, constant velocity laser printer is provided which operates in parallel to both begin printing a particular page of print media while virtually simultaneously receiving further data for that same page from a host computer. Since the communications link between the host computer and the printer is slower than the rate of consumption by the printhead provided with this printer, a certain amount of data for each page is first buffered in the printer before the print media begins to move via the printer's print engine. Since it is important for the printer to receive all of the required data for the entire page before the printhead requires that data for consumption, the printer must decide how much data of that particular page should be buffered within the printer before commanding the print engine to start moving the print media. The printer is capable of making this 'data size' to be buffered decision without any assistance from the host computer that is sending the print job to the printer-all the host need send is the standard page header information that all host computers send when transmitting a rasterized print job to a printer. The printer bases its 'data size' decision by estimating the amount of data by using the print resolution, an estimate of the compression ratio, and other information from the page header that provides a rough estimate as to how much of the area of the page of the print media is to be covered, and by estimating the communication link speed, and the amount of time that is available to perform the data transfer. Since print data is received in packets, as each packet is received, stored, and acknowledged by the printer before another packet is sent by the host, the amount of time for all of this to occur for each packet is analyzed to calculate an estimate of the approximate data transfer rate of the communications link, which is refined after receiving each new packet, but is recalculated for each new page.

Method and apparatus for adaptive data buffering in a parallelized

Printer (1) has the capability of printing in either 600 by 600 dpi resolution or 300 by 300 dpi under control of data processor controller (17). Bit maps for printing are stored in memory (19). When complex pages require more memory than is available, information from groups of bits in the 600 by 600 bit map is used to define the significance of one bit in a 300 by 300 bit map and the page is printed in the 300 by 300 bit map. This avoids terminating printing or printing partial pages and the difference in images are minor.

Continued printing by resolution reduction

In an electronic data processing apparatus blocks of returned memory 3 are linked by address pointers starting with a pointer in a table 1. Each pointer in the table 1 points to memory of within a predetermined size range varying by integral powers of 2. The memory blocks pointed to by each table pointer are sorted in order of size (alternately by frequency of use). Searching for memory of size needed is very efficient as it is limited to memory blocks within a size range. Additionally, returned memory blocks (7) of the same size as a block 3 are not in the sort list, but are pointed to by the block 3 of the same size and are used when that size block is selected.

Growing community of inventors

Nicholasville, KY, United States of America

David William Murphy