A printhead maintenance cap for attachment to a printhead, the cap comprising: a main body defining a chamber into which rinse fluid passes from the printhead during a cleaning cycle; a seal for engagement with the printhead prior to a cleaning cycle starting; and a venting system for equalizing the pressure in the chamber and the surrounding atmosphere.

A controller controls printing heads to print a page information mark with black ink to perform line flushing. The printing heads each have a plurality of inkjet nozzles for discharging ink being disposed in parallel in a width direction of web paper. Upon printing the mark, when an overlap region is present in which a mark printable region overlaps a line flushing region with ink other than the black ink, the controller performs control to decrease an ink discharge amount per unit area in the overlap region in the mark printable region to be smaller than that in the mark printable region except for the overlap region and the line flushing region. This causes a decreased total ink discharge amount in the overlap region.

A method of generating print data for an inkjet printhead having a plurality of ink planes. The method includes the steps of: receiving image data for a print job in a printer controller; retrieving keep-wet pattern data for each ink plane of the printhead, the retrieved keep-wet pattern data being determined using one or more input parameters; generating first print data for each ink plane in the printer controller based on the received image data; merging the first print data with the keep-wet pattern data to provide second print data for each ink plane; and sending the second print data from the printer controller to the printhead, thereby causing the printhead to print an image together with a keep-wet pattern. The keep-wet pattern is defined by a plurality of dots printed at a frequency sufficient to maintain hydration of each nozzle in the printhead.

In an embodiment, a method of maintaining nozzles in a print-ready condition includes determining image content to be printed in an upcoming print swath, and for each ink color present within the image content, constructing an inked portion of an associated spit bar adjacent to the upcoming print swath to include the present ink color. For each ink color not present within the image content, an empty portion of an associated spit bar is constructed adjacent to the upcoming print swath.

Provided is an image forming apparatus including an ejection section that ejects liquid droplets of plural colors including black liquid droplets, a control section that controls the ejection section such that the black liquid droplets and at least a part of the liquid droplets of other colors contact on a recording medium when preliminary ejection is performed on a non-image forming region of the recording medium, and a drying section that dries the liquid droplets of the plural colors.

An inkjet printing apparatus includes a transport speed detector for detecting transport speed of a printing medium, an inkjet head having a plurality of discharge portions for discharging ink droplets from the discharge portions for printing, and a flushing controller for carrying out discrete flushing from the discharge portions. For an acceleration area of the printing medium where the transport speed detector detects an increase in transport speed before printing, a first discharge rate is set as discharge rate of the ink droplets per unit time for the discharge flushing. For a constant speed area of the printing medium where the transport speed detector detects a substantially constant transport speed during printing, a second discharge rate lower than the first discharge rate is set as discharge rate of the ink droplets per unit time for the discharge flushing.

A method of generating print data for an inkjet printhead having a plurality of ink planes. The method includes the steps of: receiving image data for a print job in a printer controller; retrieving keep-wet pattern data for each ink plane of the printhead, the retrieved keep-wet pattern data being determined using one or more input parameters; generating first print data for each ink plane in the printer controller based on the received image data; merging the first print data with the keep-wet pattern data to provide second print data for each ink plane; and sending the second print data from the printer controller to the printhead, thereby causing the printhead to print an image together with a keep-wet pattern. The keep-wet pattern is defined by a plurality of dots printed at a frequency sufficient to maintain hydration of each nozzle in the printhead.

A print strategy periodically inserts sacrificial print media, such as a small number of sacrificial sheets of paper into a print job to exercise underused print head jets and prevent nozzle dry-up and/or degraded jetting integrity. This can be implemented with sacrificial sheets out of a tray used by a current print job or from another paper tray housing, for example, the widest stock currently installed in the image forming device. Jets that need to be exercised can be determined by using Feed-Forward image content from the Image Path, and those jets are exercised to print ink on the sacrificial sheet(s). The sacrificial sheet may be diverted to a bypass tray as scrap. Without the need for a purge cycle, or a cycle-down, the image forming device can continue seamlessly to the next print job without performance loss from using the previously under-used print head jets.

A processor acquires sheet length information representing a length in a conveying direction of a target sheet to be conveyed by a belt conveyor device. The processor selects one or both of a first flushing process and a second flushing process as a target flushing process in accordance with the sheet length information, and causes a nozzle unit to execute the target flushing process. The first flushing process is a process of ejecting ink toward each of a plurality of opening portions in an area of a conveying belt where no sheet exists. The second flushing process is a process of ejecting ink onto a non-drawing area of the target sheet in parallel with a printing process on the target sheet.

An image processing apparatus for generating image data for recording in a recording apparatus including a recording unit having a plurality of nozzles discharging ink, includes a converting unit which converts, based on characteristic information according to a characteristic of each nozzle included in the recording unit, image data corresponding to an input print job into image data to be used for recording by the recording unit and a control unit which executes one of a plurality of correction processes based on image data obtained by reading an image recorded by the recording unit. The plurality of correction processes include first correction processing that is performed after the recording of the image according to the print job is stopped, and second correction processing that is performed without stopping the recording of the image according to the print job.