Printer Controller For Inkjet Print Head

1 . A printer controller for controlling an inkjet print head, the controller comprising:

an interface for receiving image data;

a contone image decoder for decoding continuous tone image data in the received image data;

a bi-level decoder for decoding bi-level image data in the received image data;

a dithering and compositing unit for scaling the decoded continuous tone and bi-level image data to a resolution of the inkjet print head, dithering the scaled continuous tone image data, and compositing the scaled bi-level image planes with the dithered continuous tone image planes to produce print data; and

an output for outputting the print data to the inkjet print head.

2 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the interface is a high-speed serial interface.

3 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the contone image decoder is a JPEG decoder.

4 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the contone image decoder outputs separate color planes of the decoded continuous tone image data to separate buffers of the dithering and compositing unit.

5 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the bi-level decoder is a Group 4 facsimile decoder.

6 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the bi-level decoder outputs the decoded bi-level image data to respective buffers of the dithering and compositing unit.

7 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 further comprising an infrared tag encoder for encoding infrared image data for printing with the print data by the inkjet print head.

8 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 1 wherein the dithering and compositing unit has a scale unit for scaling the decoded continuous tone and bi-level image data.

9 . A printer controller as claimed in claim 8 wherein the scale unit scales the decoded continuous tone and bi-level image data by replicating the data values an integer number of times in each image dimension.