Seiko Epson Corporation

Toshiaki Isobe

Mariko Watanabe

Takeshi Miyashita

Toshiyuki Hattori

Sunao Murata

Tetsuya Suzuki

Shinji Nozawa

Hirofumi Yoshiwaka

Mamoru Akatsu

Mamiko Ishida

A printing apparatus includes: a transport unit that arranges and is able to transport a plurality of continuous paper pieces in parallel; a printing unit of which a print head reciprocates in a direction intersecting with a transport direction of the plurality of continuous paper pieces and which is configured to be able to perform printing on the plurality of continuous paper pieces separately; a reception unit that is able to receive a plurality of print jobs; and a control unit that controls operations of the transport unit and the printing unit based on the plurality of print jobs received by the reception unit.

Printing apparatus configured to print separate print jobs concurrently

An image forming apparatus for compressing image data, includes: a compression unit that reduces data into a predetermined bit number per band of image data so as to satisfy a condition related to a predetermined compression and compresses the reduced data; a specifying unit that specifies a minimum bit number among the predetermined bit numbers applied to the bands and specifies bands which are not compressed by the minimum bit number; and a re-compression unit that performs re-compression on the specified bands so that the data is compressed by the minimum bit number.

Image forming apparatus

An image processing device configured to compress image data to be used for printing with a plurality of compression levels having different compression rates includes a former stage compression unit, a storing unit and a latter stage compression unit. The latter stage compression unit is configured, after the former stage compression unit finishes compressing all of the areas, to recompress each of areas of a latest compression level at the moment being different from a compression level stored in the storing unit with the latest compression level.

Image processing device and method for image processing

To convert gray-scale data of each pixel of image data into pulse-width data for each pixel, a RAM is provided. The RAM has nine pixel memory regions corresponding to nine pixels a to i for forming, for example, a 3.times.3 pixel matrix on the output image. In each of the pixel memory regions, there are stored pulse-width data items corresponding to values which are permitted for gray-scale data to have. Pulse-width data items in the pixel memory regions are slightly different from one another among pixel memory regions. Gray-scale data of each pixel of image data and address word composed of gray-scale data of each pixel of image data and coordinates of each pixel in the 3.times.3 matrix is supplied to the RAM. Thus, pulse-width data corresponding to gray-scale data is read from the pixel memory region so that a laser drive pulse having a pulse width corresponding to the read pulse-width data is generated.

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Azumino, Japan

Toshiaki Isobe