US Patent Issued to Canon on May 20 for "Printing apparatus and ink quantity detection method thereof" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,304,214, issued on May 20, was assigned to Canon K.K. (Tokyo).

"Printing apparatus and ink quantity detection method thereof" was invented by Hirokazu Yoshikawa (Yokohama, Japan), Kei Kosaka (Tokyo) and Tetsuya Narazaki (Inagi, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A printing apparatus counts an ink quantity in an ink tank in accordance with consumption of ink from the ink tank, updates and holds a count value obtained by the count in a counter, and detects whether ink injection to the ink tank has been done before execution of sensing by a sensing unit configured to sense whether a predetermined quantity of ink is present in the ink tank...