Document feeder and method of document reading
AssigneeMinolta Co., Ltd.
InventorsKunihiko Katsuta, Akiyoshi Johdai, Tohru Murakami, Hirofumi Tanahashi
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A document feeder which picks up documents from a tray, separates/feeds a document with a feed roller and a separation roller and transports the document on a reading position with read rollers. The speed of feeding a document by the feed roller is higher than the speed of transporting a document by the read rollers. The reading position is at a distance from the nip portion between the feed roller and the separation roller, the distance being longer than the length in the document feeding direction of the document.
Claims19
A document feeder comprising:
- a stacking section on which a plurality of documents of a maximum length are stacked;
- separating/feeding means comprising:
- a feed member for feeding the documents at a first speed and a separation member which separates one of the documents from a remainder of the documents fed by said feed member;
- a reader for reading an image of the one document at a specified position;
- and
- transporting means for transporting the one document at the specified position at a second speed which is lower than the first speed;
- wherein there are no feeders or transporting means between the separating/feeding means and the transporting means.
A document feeder comprising:
- a stacking section on which a plurality of documents of a maximum length are stacked;
- separating/feeding means for separating a document from the documents stacked on the stacking section and feeding the documents one by one;
- reading means for reading an image of a document at a specified position;
- and
- document transport path which is located between the separating/feeding means and the specified position, a portion of the document transport path which is longer than the maximum length in a document feeding direction does not include any transport or feeding means.
A document feeder comprising:
- a stacking section on which a plurality of documents are stacked;
- separating/feeding means for separating a document from the documents stacked on the stacking section and feeding the documents one by one;
- reading means for reading an image of a document at a specified position;
- detecting means for detecting a length of a document in a document feeding direction;
- document transport path which is located between the separating/feeding means and the specified position, the document transport path being capable of being switched to a plurality of routes of different length for a document;
- and
- control means for switching the route in accordance with the length of the document detected by the detecting means.
A document feeder comprising:
- a stacking section on which a plurality of documents are stacked;
- separating/feeding means for separating a document from the documents stacked on the stacking section and feeding the documents one by one;
- reading means for reading an image of a document at a specified position;
- transporting means for transporting a document upstream of the specified position, the transporting means includes a device for stopping a leading edge of the document and holding the document temporarily;
- and
- a document curving area where a trailing edge of the document held by the transporting means is curved while the document is held only by the transport means at the leading edge of the document.
A method of document reading comprising the steps of:
- feeding documents at a first speed;
- separating one of the fed documents from a remainder of the documents with a separator;
- detecting a length of the fed document in a document feeding direction;
- guiding a leading edge of the one document to a specified position with a transport roller after a trailing edge of the one document passes the separator and while the one document is not being transported by a transporter or feeder;
- and
- reading an image of a document at the specified position.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.