Ink jet recording method

#This application claims priority under 35USC 119 from Japanese Patent Application No.2005-289362, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.

#1. Field of the Invention

#The present invention relates to an ink jet recording method, particularly to an ink jet recording method suitable for forming a high quality image at high speed by curing using a plurality of liquids.

#The ink jet recording method of the present invention forms a desired image by ejecting the first droplet a1, droplet a2, . . . , and droplet ax, which are derived from the first liquid A, from an ink ejecting port (head) of an ink jet printer to an impermeable or slowly-permeable recording medium. In order to form a desired image, the first liquid A comprises at least a polymerizable or crosslinkable material, and in order to achieve a high image density, the first droplet a1 and droplet a2 are jetted in such a manner they are overlapped each other. Before applying the above-described droplet a1 and droplet a2, the second liquid B having a composition different from that of the above-described liquid A is applied to the same area with or a wider area than the above-described desired image area onto the above-described recording medium. The above-described liquid B has a solubility parameter value of 35 or less, and the difference of the solubility parameter value between the above-described liquid A and liquid B is 10 or less. Herein, the solubility parameter value refers to “sp value”.

#In the ink jet recording method of the present invention, an impermeable or slowly-permeable recording medium is used as the recording medium. In image recording on such a recording medium with low liquid absorbency, if adjacent droplets (the first droplet a1 and droplet a2), which had been overlappedly applied to achieve a high image density, are in contact each other on the medium before drying, they tend to coalesce each other to cause image blurring or uneven line width of a thin line, resultingly the formability of a sharp image can be impaired. However, when the liquid B having the specified sp value is jetted before jetting the first droplet a1 and droplet a2, coalescence of the overlappedly applied droplet a1 and droplet a2 is inhibited, and problems such as image blurring and uneven line width of a thin line in an image are effectively prevented. Accordingly, a sharp line having a uniform width can be formed with keeping an image resolution of high image density, thereby a high quality image can be recorded. Furthermore, the image has low stickiness and excellent rubbing resistance.

#The impermeable recording medium refers to a medium which is substantially impermeable to droplets. “Substantially impermeable” means that the permeation rate measured one minutes after ink deposition is 5% or less. The slowly-permeable recording medium refers to a medium on which the complete permeation of 10 pl (picoliter) of droplets takes 100 mseconds or more, and specific examples thereof include art paper. The detail of the impermeable or slowly-permeable recording medium will be described later.