INK TRANSFER PRINTER AND PRINTING METHOD

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To bring the volume of a variably controllable ink on a nozzle into equilibrium state and to transfer a preset volume of ink to a printing medium by thermally controlling the release of surfactant contained in the ink. SOLUTION: An image processing unit 12 converts an image data into a thermally active map required for providing each pixel with an appropriate volume of ink and the map is transferred to an image memory. A heater control circuit 14 reads out a data from the image memory and applies a time variant or multiplex electric pulse to a nozzle heater which is a part of a print head 16. The pulse is applied to an appropriate nozzle for an appropriate interval and a selected liquid droplet comprising a controlled volume of ink is transferred to an appropriate position defined by a data in the image memory before forming a dot on a recording medium 18.