IMAGE FORMING APPARATUS AND CONTROL METHOD OF THE SAME

• Main Authors: TAKARAZAKI KENTA, TAKAYAMA YUJI, UCHIDATE HIKARU, KODAMA NARUO, ISHIKAWA TAKASHI
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 19.06.2014
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; CORRECTION OF TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS; COUNTING; ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRICITY; i.e. MECHANISMS PRINTING OTHERWISE THAN FROM A FORME; IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL; LINING MACHINES; PERFORMING OPERATIONS; PHYSICS; PICTORIAL COMMUNICATION, e.g. TELEVISION; PRINTING; SELECTIVE PRINTING MECHANISMS; STAMPS; TRANSPORTING; TYPEWRITERS

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an image forming apparatus that forms electrostatic latent images on an image carrier with light exposure according to image data, in which stable dot formation can be performed on the basis of the image data after half-tone processing.SOLUTION: A screen processing unit 101 performs half-tone processing on image data; a density fluctuation determination unit 102 detects a pixel resulted in having image quality deterioration through the processing; and an image data selection unit 103 replaces a screen pixel value of the deterioration factor pixel with an input pixel value before the half-tone processing. A dot stabilization unit 104 achieves stabilization of dot formation for obtained intermediate image data 115, that is, the pixel of which value is replaced with the input pixel value is taken as a target pixel, and the amount of exposure to the target pixel is set according to the feature amount of pixels around the target pixel; and the pixel value of the target pixel is converted so that print density obtained when the target pixel is formed with the set exposure amount becomes equal to that obtained when the target pixel is formed with a reference exposure amount. Electrostatic latent images are formed, while the target pixel of which pixel value has thus been converted is formed with the set exposure amount.