1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus including an ink cartridge for supplying the printing apparatus with ink, a carriage on and from which the ink cartridge is installed and detached and a print head mounted on the carriage. More particularly, the present invention relates to an ink cartridge precisely installed on a printing apparatus for supplying the printing apparatus with ink.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, an ink-jet printer, one of the printing apparatus, prints texts or images by ejecting ink droplets onto print media by a print head mounted on a carriage moving back and forth in direction of a horizontal scanning, while a paper feeder supplies the print media, such as papers, set in a paper feeding tray one at a time, and a paper carriage mechanism intermittently sends the print media in direction of a vertical scanning a predetermined quantity at a time. Usually, an ink cartridge containing black ink and an ink cartridge containing ink of various colors, such as yellow, cyan and magenta etc. are separately installed in a carriage of a full-colored ink-jet printer.
The carriage is made up to be divided into a head-mounted unit, on which the print head is mounted, and a cartridge mounting section, in which the ink cartridge is installed, in order to enhance maintenance efficiency of the print head. Further, a memory for storing information about a production date, a product number, the quantity of ink remained etc. is installed on the ink cartridge and a circuit board, which is coupled to the memory with a connecter and coupled to the print head, is placed in the head-mounted unit of the carriage. The circuit board is designed to transmit and receive the information about ink etc. to and from the printing apparatus. As an example of the memory for storing the information, there is a contact type memory unit including a coupling terminal member, which includes a coupling terminal exposed to the outside and a memory unit, which is electrically coupled to the coupling terminal. The coupling terminal is electrically coupled to a coupling terminal of the printing apparatus. The memory unit stores the information about ink etc.
The above usual inkjet printer has a problem that it may be damaged in case of maintenance handling of the print head, because the circuit board is placed in the head-mounted unit of the carriage.
In addition, transmitting and receiving the information cannot be properly done, unless the coupling terminal member of the memory unit of the ink cartridge certainly contacts to the coupling terminal of the print head. Particularly, when a plurality of the coupling terminal with a small coupling terminal area is closely arranged, the coupling terminal member needs to be very exactly coupled to the coupling terminal of the printing apparatus.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds