Appeal 2007-1270
Application 10/607,873
OPINION
The Examiner asserts (Answer 3) that Christiansen teaches advancing
a media and marking the media as it advances. Further, the Examiner asserts
(Answer 3) that Christiansen's apparatus "must inherently sense the
advancement of the media. In other words, the apparatus cannot provide
alignment without sensing an advancement of the media." Appellants
contend (Br. 4-14) that Christiansen does not inherently sense advancement
of the media, as Christiansen does not require media advancement for
detecting alignment marks. The issue, therefore, is whether Christiansen, in
sensing alignment marks, inherently senses media advancement.
Christiansen discloses (col. 3, ll. 35-37, and col. 5, ll. 2-6) that
registration marks can be printed along the top and bottom of pages fed into
a printer for centering images on the pages. Further, Christiansen (col. 5,
ll. 29-35) uses an optical scanner to detect the registration marks for re-
calibrating the page position where printing is to begin. Christiansen
explains (col. 5, ll. 60-64) that controller 220 can issue correction signals to
the print engine "to print successive pages using the previously detected
registration marks as indicators of where to start and stop printing."
Christiansen shows in Figure 2 that print engine 210 prints registration
marks on paper 200 as it advances to the left, and scanner 290 detects the
marks as the paper continues to advance to the left.
If a page were advancing faster than expected, then the scanner 290
would sense more marks at the beginning of the page than at the end of the
page (as the page would move past the print engine before both sets of
marks were complete). Thus, the marks would indicate that the page had
advanced too much for printing to be centered, and the controller would
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Last modified: September 9, 2013