摘要 |
The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for compensating for malperforming or inoperative ink nozzles in a multitone ink jet printhead so that high quality images are printed although some ink nozzles are malperforming or inoperative. Multitone printing is effected by printing a variety of droplets of varying volumes at a given pixel location. In compensating for a malperforming nozzle, a swath data signal is modified and one or more functional nozzles are assigned the printing data for a malperforming nozzle such that the volume of ink ultimately printed at pixel locations is substantially unchanged and the resulting image is free from degradation. Additionally, malperforming nozzles may be assigned values which represent the degree of image degradation that would be caused by printing with the malperforming nozzles, such that these values may be taken into consideration during the process of modifying the swath data signal for complementary recording.
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