Ink drop printer with print engine controller
View Patent ↗An ink drop printer driven by a print engine controller comprising: an interface at which to receive compressed page data; a contone image decoder to decode any continuous tone image planes in the received compressed page data; a bi-level decoder to decode any bi-level image planes in the received compressed page data; a half-toner/compositor to dither any continuous tone image planes and composite bi-level image plane data with any dithered image plane; a print head driver to output the composite to a print head; and a print head, wherein the contone image decoder outputs separate color planes of the decoded continuous tone image planes to separate buffers in a front end to the halftoner/compositor.
1. An ink drop printer driven by a print engine controller comprising:
an interface at which to receive compressed page data;
a contone image decoder to decode any continuous tone image planes in the received compressed page data;
a bi-level decoder to decode any bi-level image planes in the received compressed page data;
a half-toner/compositor to dither any continuous tone image planes and composite bi-level image plane data with any dithered image plane;
a print head driver to output the composite to a print head; and
a print head,
wherein the contone image decoder outputs separate color planes of the decoded continuous tone image planes to separate buffers in a front end to the halftoner/compositor.
2. A printer as claimed in claim 1 wherein the page data in the bi-level image plane is scaled in the halftoner/compositor.
3. A printer as claimed in claim 1 wherein page data in each contone image plane is scaled in the halftoner/compositor.
4. A printer as claimed in claim 1 wherein the bi-level decoder is a Group 4 facsimile decoder.
5. A printer as claimed in claim 1 wherein the bi-level decoder outputs the decoded bi-level image planes to respective buffers in a front end to the halftoner/compositor.
6. A printer as claimed in claim 1 further including an infrared tag encoder to produce an infrared image plane to place infrared ink printed tags into a printed page.