Image forming apparatus with sideways U-shaped sheet path
AssigneeCanon Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorsYutaka Kikuchi, Seiji Sagara, Yuzo Isoda
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus in which a sheet material is fed from a sheet feeding unit to an image forming unit for image formation on the sheet material, and the sheet material is transported and discharged to a sheet discharge unit after image formation. The image forming apparatus includes a substantially horizontal sheet feeding unit provided at either of an upper position and a lower position of the image forming unit at the center, and a substantially horizontal sheet discharge unit provided at the other of the positions; and a sheet path extending substantially vertically from the sheet feeding unit through the image forming unit to the sheet discharge unit.
Claims26
An image forming apparatus having image forming means, sheet feeding means for feeding a stored sheet and transporting means for transporting the sheet fed by said sheet feeding means through an image forming section of said image forming means to a discharge tray, comprising:
- sheet storing means provided on a housing of said image forming apparatus at one of an upper portion and a lower portion, relative to the image forming section, for storing said sheet;
- and
- support means for partially supporting said transporting means and being openable relative to the housing of said image forming apparatus while leaving said sheet storing means and said discharge tray in said housing,
- wherein said sheet feeding means feeds the sheet from a side of said support means in one direction while a sheet discharge means discharges the sheet to said discharge tray in a direction reverse thereto.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.