| 摘要 |
A printer and a control method for a printer can externally detect the number of elements in the line head, and can determine the dot density of the line head from the detected number of elements. The printer has a thermal head 1 having an array of plural elements for forming print dots, a plural stage shift register 3 that shifts the input data according to a clock signal, a latch 2 that temporarily stores the output from each stage (3-1 to 3-n) of the shift register 3, a driver 2 that outputs the data held in each latch to the element of the thermal head 1 corresponding to each latch as print data based on a strobe signal, a output terminal 4 that outputs the output data of the last stage of the shift register 3, an element count detection data generating unit 13 that inputs to the shift register 3 input data of which the value corresponding to the first clock pulse is 1 and all following values are 0, and an element number counting unit 12 that detects the number of elements by counting the clock pulses until the data output from the output terminal 4 is 1. |
