Alps Electric Co., Ltd.

Rimage Corporation

Hiroshi Takahashi

Takashi Onozato

Tadami Kikuchi

Tadashi Nakamura

Koichi Sugiyama

Hiroyuki Murayama

David J Suden

Toshihiko Hatakeyama

William L Vangen

Michinori Imamura

Jay Carter

A printer includes an ink cartridge mounted on a main body, ink contained in the ink cartridge, a discriminating member attached to the ink cartridge and having information recorded with on the ink cartridge, the ink cartridge being discriminated by the information recorded on the discriminating member, a memory for individually storing information items of a plurality of the ink cartridges, a control unit for determining a status of ink level in the ink cartridge mounted on the main body by the information recorded on the discriminating member and by the information items of each ink cartridge stored in the memory.

Printer

To provide a thermal printer capable of easily improving a recording quality, a plurality of recording units, arranged along a carrying path of a recording medium, are respectively provided with a recording head, a platen which opposes the recording head with the carrying path interposed therebetween and is brought into contact with and separated from the recording head, a carrying unit including a carrying roller arranged on the downstream side of the recording head, and a friction unit including a friction roller arranged on the downstream side of the carrying unit in order to prevent the disturbance generated on the downstream side from propagating upstream via the recording medium, between the respective recording units.

Thermal printer including a plurality of recording units

A compact disc transporter has been described that includes a two-step printer. The printer uses an intermediate transfer sheet to receive a print image that is subsequently transferred to a compact disc. The transporter allows parallel processing of image data and content data. A significant time reduction can be achieved by preprinting the image to a transfer sheet prior to transferring the image to a CD.

CD transporter with re-transfer printer

The thermal transfer line printer is provided with tension roller position detection means having tension rollers, rotatable tension roller support frames that support the tension rollers rotatably and press the tension rollers toward an intermediate sheet, and a detector and a sensor for detecting a position of the tension rollers and is provided with a controller for controlling operation of an intermediate transfer sheet feeding motor that moves at least the intermediate transfer sheet, and the controller controls the intermediate transfer sheet feeding motor so as to position the detectors in a detection range of the sensors when the intermediate transfer sheet is moved.

Thermal transfer printer that is capable of maintaining intermediate transfer sheet tension constant

A paper feeder in a printer comprises a bottom recording paper guide, an extreme end recording paper guide, a roller, and a mechanism for transferring paper. The bottom recording paper guide is inclined in the paper feeding direction at an angle in the range of ten degrees to thirty degrees.

Growing community of inventors

Fukushima-ken, Japan

Hiroshi Takahashi