Print engine/controller and printhead interface chip incorporating the engine/controller
View Patent ↗A print engine/controller suited to use with a drop on demand print head. The print engine/controller works with compressed page data having both JPEG contone image layers and a bi-level image plane compressed using a Group 4 facsimile protocol. It receives compressed image plane's and effects expansion and printing in a pipeline fashion. It consists of a high speed serial interface ( 27 ) (such as a standard IEEE 1394 interface), a standard JPEG decoder ( 28 ), a standard Group 4 Fax decoder ( 39 ), a halftoner/compositor unit ( 29 ), a tag encoder ( 30 ) by which to place infrared tags into a printed page, a line loader/formatter unit 31 feeding an interface 32 to the print head ( 33 ). The decoders ( 28, 39 ) and encoder ( 30 ) are buffered to the halftoner/compositor ( 29 ).
1. A print engine/controller to drive an ink drop print head comprising:
a contone image decoder to decode any compressed continuous tone image planes in the received compressed page data;
a bi-level decoder to decode any compressed bi-level image plane; and
a halftoner/compositor including a dot merger unit controlled by a color mask to effect integration of the image planes with what inks are provided in the print head,
wherein the page data in the bi-level image plane is scaled in the halftoner/compositor.
2. A print engine/controller to drive an ink drop print head comprising:
a contone image decoder to decode any compressed continuous tone image planes in the received compressed page data;
a bi-level decoder to decode any compressed bi-level image plane; and
a halftoner/compositor including a margin unit to apply margin data to the respective image planes during the composite process,
wherein the page data in the bi-level image plane is scaled in the halftoner/compositor.