Appeal No. 96-3102
Application 08/322,971
successive drive pulses be determined or measured. The
examiner recognizes that the European patent application does
not teach such an arrangement and relies on Sasaki to overcome
this deficiency. According to the examiner:
The secondary reference to Sasaki is also
concerned with calculating and determining
an appropriate amount of energy to apply to
a thermal print element. Sasaki is added
for completeness to explicitly shown [sic,
show] an energy or heating determining
means (see figures 1, 2, 4 and 8) as
claimed. As shown in figure 8 and
described in columns 6-7, Sasaki employs a
"heating amount calculating section" (12)
and a "pulse number converting section"
(29) that perform the broadly recited
function of determining the energy applied
to the print elements as found in claim 1.
Therefore given that both the primary and
secondary references are concerned with
thermal print pulse compensation as is
conventional, it would have been obvious to
one of ordinary skill in the art to modify
'507 [the European patent application] with
the energy determining means of Sasaki so
that energy levels may be determined with a
simple circuit and a detailed table of
values requiring substantial memory space
would be unnecessary. [Answer, pages 4 and
5.]
We will not support the examiner's position. In
particular, we cannot agree with the examiner's finding that
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