Image forming apparatus including a toner supply controller to control a supply of toner
AssigneeRicoh Company, Ltd.
InventorsHiroyuki Kawamoto, Kazunari Tonami, Shuji Hirai, Hiroshi Okuda
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
An image-information acquiring unit acquires the image information divided at least in one of a main-scanning direction and a sub-scanning direction. A supply control unit calculates basic-supply patterns of a supply amount of toner and controls the supply amount at a supply point in a developing unit using a toner supply pattern combined with the basic-supply patterns that eliminate temporal variation in toner density of the developer, at the specific point, due to development of the latent image.
Claims12
An image forming apparatus comprising:
- a latent image forming unit configured to form a latent image by irradiating an image carrier, which rotates or moves, with a light beam according to image information;
- a conveying unit configured to convey and circulate two-component developer containing toner and carrier in a conveying path;
- a toner supplying unit configured to supply toner to the two-component developer at a predetermined supply point in the conveying path;
- a developing unit that develops the latent image formed on the image carrier with the two-component developer;
- an acquiring unit that acquires the image information in units of divided image information obtained by dividing the image information at least in one of a main-scanning direction and a sub-scanning direction;
- and
- a supply control unit that calculates, based on the image information acquired by the acquiring unit, basic-supply patterns of a supply amount of toner in units of the divided image information and controls the supply amount of toner at the supply point using a toner supply pattern combined with calculated basic-supply patterns, the basic-supply patterns eliminating temporal variation in toner density of the two-component developer at a specific point in the conveying path due to development of the latent image according to the image information acquired by the acquiring unit.
An image forming method implemented on an image forming apparatus, the image forming apparatus comprising a latent image forming unit configured to form a latent image by irradiating an image carrier, which rotates or moves, with a light beam according to image information;
- a conveying unit configured to convey and circulate two-component developer containing toner and carrier in a conveying path;
- a toner supplying unit configured to supply toner to the two-component developer at a predetermined supply point in the conveying path;
- and a developing unit that develops the latent image formed on the image carrier with the two-component developer, the image forming method comprising:
- acquiring the image information in units of divided image information obtained by dividing the image information at least in one of a main-scanning direction and a sub-scanning direction;
- and
- calculating, based on the image information acquired at the acquiring, basic-supply patterns of a supply amount of toner in units of the divided image information and controlling the supply amount of toner at the supply point using a toner supply pattern combined with calculated basic-supply patterns, the basic-supply patterns eliminating temporal variation in toner density of the two-component developer at a specific point in the conveying path due to development of the latent image according to the image information acquired at the acquiring.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.