A method of performing printhead maintenance firing in an ink jet printer that has a printhead carrier that carries an ink jet printhead, the ink jet printer having a waste ink receptacle, includes the steps of decelerating the printhead carrier from a first velocity after printing print data; and controlling a firing of the printhead during the decelerating in accordance with maintenance data so that ink droplets ejected from the printhead during the decelerating are received by the waste ink receptacle.
An image-forming apparatus is capable of performing a non-margin recording operation without a margin on a recording medium and providing a waiting time between a moment of termination of a movement of a carriage in one of opposite directions and a moment of initiation of a subsequent movement of the carriage in the other direction, if the non-margin recording operation is performed during the movement of the carriage in the above-indicated one direction. The carriage is moved in the other direction (returned) at a speed lower than that of the movement in the above-indicated one direction, so that the back surface of an edge portion (e.g., leading end portion) of the recording medium is protected from contamination with an ink mist produced from the ink droplets. The waiting time and the return speed of the carriage can be manually selected or changed by using an operator's control panel, so that the non-margin recording operation can be performed in a desired manner (in a high-image-quality mode or a high-speed mode).
