Image forming apparatus which controls setting of contrast potential
AssigneeCanon Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorJun Hirabayashi
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An image forming apparatus, which is capable of bringing an output density close to a target density even if a charge amount of toner particles changes, includes an image forming unit having an image carrier and a developing unit, a storage unit storing a saturation charge amount of toner particles, and a control unit. The control unit forms a patch image using the image forming unit, measures the density of the patch image to obtain a first potential that is a contrast potential corresponding to a target density, estimates the charge amount of the toner particles in the developing unit to obtain a first charge amount, obtains a second potential from the first potential, the first charge amount and the saturation charge amount, and sets the second potential as the contrast potential.
Claims6
An image forming apparatus comprising:
- an image forming unit including an image carrier and a developing unit configured to develop toner particles on the image carrier;
- a storage unit configured to store a saturation charge amount of the toner particles;
- and
- a control unit,
- wherein the control unit is configured to form a patch image using the image forming unit, measure a density of the patch image to obtain a first potential that is a contrast potential corresponding to a target density, estimate a charge amount of the toner particles in the developing unit to obtain a first charge amount, obtain a second potential from the first potential, the first charge amount and the saturation charge amount, and set the second potential as the contrast potential.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.