Image forming apparatus with plurality of optical scanning devices

摘要

An image forming apparatus includes a plurality of optical scanning devices, a job receiver, a job executor, an image discriminator for discriminating whether a formation-target image included in an image forming job is a single-color image or a multi-color image, a first condition judger, a second condition judger and a temperature adjuster. In the case of forming a single-color image, the temperature adjuster drives motors of all the optical scanning devices if a predetermined first condition and a predetermined second condition are satisfied and drives the motor of one optical scanning device and does not drive the motors of the other optical scanning devices but the one optical scanning device if the first condition is satisfied, but the second condition is not satisfied.

主权项

1. An image forming apparatus including a plurality of optical scanning devices arranged in correspondence with a plurality of photoconductors, configured to scan the corresponding photoconductors with laser light, comprising:
an optical scanning device including
a light source for emitting laser light,a rotational polygon mirror for reflecting the laser light output from the light source and scanning the photoconductor,a motor for rotating the rotational polygon mirror, anda temperature detector for detecting temperature of the optical scanning device; a job receiver for receiving an execution request of an image forming job; a job executor for executing the image forming job, the execution request of which has been received by the job receiver; an image discriminator for discriminating whether each formation-target image included in the image forming job being executed is a single-color image to be formed using only one of the plurality of optical scanning devices or a multi-color image to be formed using a plurality of ones of the optical scanning devices; a first condition judger for judging whether or not a largest temperature difference out of temperature differences between temperature detected by the temperature detector of the one optical scanning device and temperatures detected by all the temperature detectors but the temperature detector of the one optical scanning device satisfies a first condition of being larger than a predetermined temperature difference; a second condition judger for judging whether or not a second condition indicating a high possibility that a next formation-target image is the multi-color image is satisfied; and a temperature adjuster for performing a total motor drive process for driving the motors of all the optical scanning devices if the first condition is judged to be satisfied by the first condition judger and the second condition is judged to be satisfied by the second condition judger when a current formation-target image is discriminated to be the single-color image by the image discriminator and driving the motor of the one optical scanning device and not driving the motors of all the optical scanning devices but the one optical scanning device if the first condition is judged to be satisfied by the first condition judger and the second condition is judged not to be satisfied by the second condition judger when a current formation-target image is discriminated to be the single-color image by the image discriminator.