Sheet stacking apparatus and image forming system with automatically controlled moving stage
AssigneeKonica Minolta Business Technologies, Inc.
InventorTakao Kurohata
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A sheet stacking apparatus includes a stage, a driving unit to drive the stage, and a sheet detection device to detect that a sheet exists on the stage. Operation of the sheet stacking apparatus is controlled so that the stage descends in accordance with an amount of sheets to be stacked, and when a job executed in an image forming apparatus is completed, the stage automatically moves to a sheet removing position. The sheet stacking apparatus is controlled so that sheets of a mixing prohibition job are not stacked with sheets of another job, by detecting that a sheet of another job exists on the stage.
Claims4
A sheet stacking apparatus which is attachable to an image forming apparatus that executes a job for forming an image on a sheet, and which stacks sheets ejected from the image forming apparatus, the sheet stacking apparatus comprising:
- a stage to receive a sheet ejected from the image forming apparatus;
- a sheet detection device to detect whether or not any sheet is present on the stage;
- a driving section to move the stage;
- and
- a control section to control the driving section to move the stage;
- wherein, in a case in which job attribute information set in the image forming apparatus indicates that the job executed by the image forming apparatus is a mixing prohibition job, the control section controls the driving section to move the stage to a sheet removing position automatically, when an output of the sheet detection device indicates that a sheet of a previous job is present on the stage, so as to prevent the sheet of the mixing prohibition job from mixing with the sheet of the previous job;
- and
- wherein in a case in which job attribute information set in the image forming apparatus indicates that the job executed by the image forming apparatus is not a mixing prohibition job, the job is executed irrespective of whether the sheet of the previous job is present on the stage.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.