Appeal No. 1999-1115
Application No. 08/821,217
At the outset, we note that, in accordance with appellants’ grouping of the claims at page 2 of the
principal brief, all claims will stand or fall together. Accordingly, we need to be concerned only with
independent claim 1.
As the examiner has pointed out, Hirano discloses the subject matter of instant claim 1 (a movable
module, a head and motor integrally mounted to conserve space and capable of sliding back and forth
along a track, and the same type of rack and pinion structure to which the “coupling” language of claim
1 refers) but for the claimed “optical reader.” Because Hirano is not concerned with an image head for
scanning, but rather with a printing head, Hirano integrates a recording head 31 with motor 32 rather
than an optical reader with the motor, as is presently claimed.
The examiner was cognizant of this difference and pointed to Carbone to provide for the deficiency
of Hirano. Carbone discloses an optical reader for use in scanning images. While appellants may be
correct in identifying the structure of Carbone as being analogous to the conventional scanner upon
which they improve (where the driving motor is mounted on a fixed frame with the optical scanner
mounted on a movable module), it is the teaching of Hirano which suggests an improvement whereby a
head and motor may be mounted integrally on a movable module. The importance of Carbone’s
teaching with regard to the instant rejection is at column 1, lines 61-64, wherein it is stated:
The dot-matrix printer printhead can be removed and replaced by the
optical sensor so that the printer is transformed into an image sensing
device with the exclusive purpose of image scanning.
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