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US 5,168,316 AGranted
Sheer feeding control mechanism for an image forming apparatus
AssigneeKabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
InventorsRika Hino, Yasufumi Tanimoto
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An image forming apparatus is so constructed that, even when, during a portion of a processing for feeding the medium from one of a plurality of medium storage sections, the medium storage section involved becomes empty in the case where there exists, in the other medium storage section or sections, those mediums equal to or greater than the aforementioned medium which are not to be continuously fed, it is possible to continuously feed a medium from the medium storage section only arbitrarily selected in accordance with the order of priority.
Claims2
An image forming apparatus comprising:
- a plurality of housing members, each accommodating a recording medium;
- means for feeding the recording medium from one of the housing members;
- means for forming an image on the recording medium fed from the housing members by the feeding means;
- means, operable by an operator of the image forming apparatus, for determining an order of the feeding operation of the feeding means with respect to the housing members;
- means for selecting a first housing member which is determined to be a first order of the feeding operation by the determining means;
- means for changing the order of the feeding operation determined by the determining means while the feeding means feeds the recording medium from the first housing member;
- and
- means for operating the selecting means to switchover from the first housing member to a second housing member which is determined to be a second order of the feeding operation by the changing means when the recording medium in the first housing member is empty, so as to continuously feed the recording medium by the feeding means.
5 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.