Appeal No. 1999-1931
Application No. 08/734,319
appellant’s silence as an acknowledgment of the existence of these processing stations in
such systems.
The issue, then, is the application of Monma, together with Hirota, in rejecting the
instant claims.
The instant claims all require, in one form or another, that the drive signals produced
by the laser driver are “produced earlier than said active edges when an image data bit
represents an image edge” while the drive signals are produced synchronously with the
active edges when an image data bit represents a standard image area. Thus, a laser is
turned ON earlier when a solid image is produced so as to more accurately locate the
edge placement.
In contrast, Monma is concerned with compensating for “laser droop” wherein the
amount of light emitted from a laser diode immediately after the laser diode is energized
“becomes a few % greater than a desired target amount of light” [column 2, lines 7-8].
Monma does have many of the same elements as set forth in the instant claims, and
does recite [column 2, lines 54-64] an object of the invention is
to provide...for driving a laser beam source to energize/de-energize laser
oscillation for exposing a subject or original while supplying a bias
current of a level lower than a threshold level of the laser beam source
to a laser diode, by starting to supply the bias current to the laser diode
at a position in front of a leading edge of the subject and behind a trailing
edge of a preceding subject for thereby preventing a reproduced image
4
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007