Incremental printing of symbolic information – Ink jet – Controller
Reexamination Certificate
2001-11-26
2003-12-02
Meier, Stephen D. (Department: 2853)
Incremental printing of symbolic information
Ink jet
Controller
C347S023000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06655779
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a technique of judging compatibility between ink cartridges and a printing apparatus.
DESCRIPTION OF THE RELATED ART
The ink jet printer generally carries out printing with ink supplied from an ink cartridge. Different ink cartridges have different contours and keep inks of different compositions. Selection of an ink cartridge that has the contour attachable to a specified printer but is incompatible with the printer gives unsatisfactory printing results. In order to prevent such a potential problem, various techniques have been proposed to determine the compatibility of the ink cartridge with the printer.
A proposed ink cartridge has a memory that stores therein various pieces of information including a production code of the ink cartridge. A list of compatible ink cartridges is stored in advance in the printer to which this ink cartridge is attached. The printer collates data read from the memory included in the ink cartridge with the list and thereby determines the compatibility of the ink cartridge with the printer, that is, whether or not the ink cartridge is applicable for the printer.
Another proposed technique provides a print head of the printer with ID information. The ID information of available print heads is stored in advance in a memory included in the ink cartridge. The printer determines the compatibility by collation of the ID information.
In the former technique, however, the list stored in the printer is provided as part of the firmware, and in many cases, the user does not update the list. The printer may thus determine that a newly developed ink cartridge without the production code in the list is unusable, even when the ink cartridge is actually compatible. Design of the list by taking into account the production codes of future ink cartridges certainly prevents this problem, but allocation of the production codes becomes undesirably complicated.
The latter technique allows even a newly developed ink cartridge to be applied to the old-type printer. The printing result, however, does not depend upon only the specification of the print head and the other hardware construction. Attachment of the newly developed ink cartridge to the printer having the compatible hardware may not give the favorable printing result, when the selected version of the printer driver is not compatible with the ink cartridge.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The object of the present invention is thus to solve the problems discussed above and to provide a technique of flexibly determining compatibility of an ink cartridge with a printing apparatus with high accuracy.
In order to attain at least part of the above and the other related objects, the present invention is directed to an ink cartridge attachable to a printing apparatus. The ink cartridge has a storage element that stores therein compatible driver information, which is used to specify a printer driver compatible with the ink cartridge.
The printer driver is designed according to the specification of the printing apparatus and the ink kept in the ink cartridge attached to the printing apparatus. Collation of the printer driver used for printing with the compatible driver information specifies the software compatibility of the ink cartridge with the printing apparatus to which the ink cartridge is attached. In the structure of the present invention, the compatible driver information is stored in the in cartridge. This arrangement enables the latest information relating to the compatibility to be provided even with regard to any newly developed ink cartridge, thus ensuring appropriate determination of compatibility.
Diverse procedures are applicable for the operation of the printing apparatus after the determination of compatibility. For example, in the case of ‘incompatible’, the printing operation may be prohibited, or installation of a preferable printer driver may be suggested. Another applicable procedure informs the user of the incompatible combination and entrusts the user with determination of forcible execution or non-execution of the printing operation.
In the ink cartridge of the present invention, it is preferable that the compatible driver information includes version information of the printer driver.
The printer driver may be subjected to version up for the purpose of enhancing the printing quality. In such cases, application of the ink cartridge of the present invention desirably enables determination of compatibility of the ink cartridge with the new version of the printer driver.
In the ink cartridge of the present invention, it is also preferable that the compatible driver information includes prohibition information to specify at least one of a printing apparatus and a printer driver, for which use of the ink cartridge is prohibited.
In the case where the ink cartridge is incompatible with the printing apparatus, the forcible execution of printing may significantly worsen the printing quality or may cause fatal troubles to arise in the printing apparatus. For example, application of pigment ink to a print head for dye ink may cause the print head to be clogged. In such cases, application of the present invention positively prohibits the use of the ink cartridge that may cause fatal troubles.
In accordance with one preferable embodiment of the ink cartridge of the present invention, the compatible driver information expresses compatibility of the ink cartridge with multiple printer drivers in a stepwise manner.
For example, it is assumed that the respective combinations of the ink cartridge with the printer driver have the following relations. The combination with the printer driver of version 4 is optimum (that is, attaining the highest printing quality). The combination with the version 3 is compatible, though not being so suitable as the combination with the version 4. The combination with the version 2 is allowed with a little deterioration of the printing quality. The combination with the version 1 significantly worsens the printing quality. In this case, the ink cartridge of the present invention is applied to specify the degree of compatibility with the printer driver and inform the user of the presence of another printer driver having the higher compatibility. Application of the printer driver that is capable of selecting a processing specification and parameters among a plurality of options in the course of generating print data from master image data enables the details of the processing to be changed according to the information read from the storage element included in the ink cartridge.
In the above embodiment of the ink cartridge, the compatible driver information may store a mapping of the ink cartridge to multiple printer drivers with regard to each printing apparatus. This arrangement ensures application of the ink cartridge to a plurality of different printing apparatuses.
In the structure of the present invention, a plurality of different inks may be kept collectively in one ink cartridge.
In one preferable embodiment, the ink cartridge keeps one ink, and the storage element further stores therein ink specification information, which is used to specify the ink kept in the ink cartridge.
In the ink cartridge of the above embodiment, the ink specification information may include color information of the ink.
The ink specification information may include composition information of the ink.
The color information is, for example, the name of color like cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. The composition information regards, for example, the composition of ink like dye ink or pigment ink. When there are inks of an identical hue but different compositions, identification information for discriminating the compositions from each other is included in the composition information.
In the above arrangement of the present invention, the compatible driver information for specifying the compatible printer drivers is stored in the storage element included in each of ink cartridges that keep inks of diverse colors and components. This arrangement ensures deter
Koshino Kazuo
Matsuzaka Hideto
Saruta Toshihisa
Usui Kiyofumi
Meier Stephen D.
Oliff & Berridg,e PLC
Seiko Epson Corporation
Stewart Jr. Charles W.
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