Incremental printing of symbolic information – Ink jet – Controller
Reexamination Certificate
2002-09-20
2004-03-30
Stephens, Juanita (Department: 2853)
Incremental printing of symbolic information
Ink jet
Controller
C347S104000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06712444
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for forming an image on a recording medium. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for forming an image on a recording medium having expansion/contraction properties such as a cloth. The present invention also relates to a method and apparatus for forming an image by emitting ink using an ink-jet head according to an ink-jet recording technique.
2. Description of the Related Art
An ink-jet recording apparatus is widely used because of its ease of use. In this type of recording apparatus, recording is accomplished by emitting ink toward a recording medium.
The ink-jet recording apparatus includes an ink-jet head for emitting an ink droplet and an ink tank for storing ink to be supplied to the ink-jet head. The ink-jet head has an emission orifice through which ink is emitted. Near the emission orifice, there is provided an emission energy generator used to emit ink. Various types of energy generators are known. They include a heat generator for applying thermal energy to ink and a piezoelectric device for applying a mechanical pressure to ink thereby emitting the ink. The ink tank is connected to the emission orifice via an ink flowing path.
In recent years, image forming apparatus for printing an image on a cloth according to an-ink-jet technique is used. In this type of textile printing system, unlike conventional screen textile printing systems, it is not required to prepare a master image to be printed. Therefore, this type of textile printing system has the advantage that a wide variety of images can be printed and the total printing cost is low.
However, both the ink-jet textile printing system and the screen textile printing system have a common problem that expansion/contraction or deformation of a cloth during a printing process can cause a printed image to have distortion. This problem is described in further detail below for both textile printing systems.
(1) Screen Textile Printing System
In screen textile printing systems, a printing belt having a flat surface with a size as large as 10 to 30 meters is used to move a plurality of screen frames up and down in a vertical direction thereby forming a color image on a cloth. The cloth on which the image is to be printed is stuck via an adhesive material onto the printing belt using a cloth expanding and sticking apparatus. It is generally required that bending and skewing during the expanding and sticking process should be less than 3%. To meet the above requirement, the bending/skewing of the cloth is corrected using a cloth bending/skewing correcting apparatus before the cloth is supplied to the cloth stretching apparatus. However, the highest available correction accuracy is 1% to 3%. This rather low correction accuracy causes printed images to have distortion.
(2) Ink-Jet Printing System
An example of an ink-jet printing system is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 5-212851. In this type of textile printing system, as can be seen from the description and the drawing of the patent cited above, in particular from
FIG. 2
thereof, printing is performed by emitting ink from an ink-jet head toward a cloth employed as a recording medium being moved in a vertical direction. The system has a printing section for emitting ink. The printing section includes a printing unit provided with an ink-jet head and also includes a conveying mechanism including an endless belt or a conveying belt made of metal wherein the printing unit and the conveying mechanism are disposed at locations opposing each other via a cloth.
An adhesive layer is provided on the surface of the conveying belt so that the cloth can be stuck in a flat fashion on the conveying belt via the adhesive layer. The conveying belt is driven such that it rotates intermittently so as to intermittently convey the cloth by a predetermined distance at a time.
An image is printed on the surface of the cloth along one printing line at a time using a known serial printing technique. After completion of the printing, the cloth is pulled by a proper tension applied by a wind-up roller disposed at an extremely downstream location on the conveying path. At the end of the conveying belt, the cloth is separated from the adhesive layer and wound around the wind-up roller via a cloth path.
In ink-jet printing systems including the specific example described above, a cease-preventing roller is generally used to prevent the cloth from having creases when the cloth is stuck onto the adhesive layer of the conveying belt. This causes the cloth to have a nonuniform tension. As result, the cloth stuck to the conveying belt has distortion. In order to improve the sticking accuracy to the adhesive layer, it is required to expand the cloth in a paticular direction. If an image is printed on the expanded cloth, the aspect ratio of the image will become incorrect when the cloth is released from the expansion.
In the conventional screen textile printing system, as described above, it is known to use a cloth bending/skewing correcting apparatus to correct the bending/skewing of a cloth. However, about 3% distortion occurs in commonly-used apparatus and about 1% distortion occurs in highest-performance apparatus. As a result, the image printed on the cloth always has distortion. In order to precisely feed a cloth without creating distortion in printed images using the conventional screen textile printing apparatus in which distortion of the cloth is mechanically corrected, complicated mechanisms and/or troublesome manual operations by a human operator are required. In practice, therefore, printed images have a ceratin amount of distortion.
The distortion of the recording medium can cause a serious problem in particular when an image is formed via a plurality of image forming processes using various types of dyes as is the case with the textile printing on a mixed fabric. In such textile printing processes, distortion occurs not only in an image formed first but also in an image formed later. The distortion in the images can cause the images to be shifted from each other. Thus, an image miss registration or an undesirable nonuniformity can occur.
In the textile printing on a cloth, an image formed on the cloth is fixed by impregnating a coloring agent such as a dye contained in ink into fibers. When the cloth has a large thickness, it is required to impregnate a larger amount of dye into fibers. In general, the proper amount of dye impregnated into fibers is determined by visually observing the back side of the cloth on which no image is printed to check whether the dye reaches the back side.
In the art of the textile printing, it is desired to form an image on a cloth such that the image can be viewed from both sides thereby increasing the value of the cloth in markets. In particular for cloths such as a handkerchief and a scarf or for a decorating cloth such as a curtain, an image on a cloth is viewed from both sides in most cases and thus it is desirable that images be formed on both sides by increasing the amount of dye which reaches the back side in such a manner that the images on both sides correspond to each other.
One possible technique to increase the amount of dye present on the back side is to print an image on both sides of a cloth. However, in practice, it is very difficult to print an image on both sides in the ink-jet textile printing technique and also in the screen textile printing technique. In particular, it is not known to form images on both sides such that the images formed on the respective sides are coincident with each other. Some methods of printing images on both sides of a cloth are described below. However note that these methods are not good enough.
(1) A dye having a high penetration property is employed so that the dye can reach the back side.
This technique is limited to cloths having a small thickness. Another problem of this technique is that the high penetration property of the dye causes an image formed on a
Abe Junkichi
Miyake Hiroyuki
Canon Kabushiki Kaisha
Fitzpatrick ,Cella, Harper & Scinto
Stephens Juanita
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