US Patent Issued to Ricoh on Dec. 30 for "Image forming apparatus and coating-film adjusting method" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,510,859, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to Ricoh Co. Ltd. (Tokyo).

"Image forming apparatus and coating-film adjusting method" was invented by Hideki Kimura (Kanagawa, Japan), Seiichi Kogure (Kanagawa, Japan), Hiroshi Kikuchi (Kanagawa, Japan), Hirotaka Hatta (Kanagawa, Japan), Yusuke Ishizuka (Kanagawa, Japan), Takuya Akiyama (Kanagawa, Japan), Yuuki Aoki (Tokyo), Yutaka Goto (Tokyo) and Masashi Tachi (Kanagawa, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An image forming apparatus includes an image bearer, a cleaning blade having an elastic member contacting a surface of the image bearer, the cleaning blade removing a residue on the surface ...