Abstract
This paper identifies a cause of pick up noise in a laser printer and a relationship between pick up noise and major components related to pick up noise. A pick up sound is affected by many components such as spring force, spring constant, and friction coefficient. Objective evaluation for the pick up sound is difficult because of back ground sound such as operating sound. Especially, a sound between a friction pad and a paper in the process of printing has become an essential issue in an aspect of quality evaluation. However the existing criteria for determining the above sound have solely relied on human's subjective judgments; which highlights the requirement to objectify these criteria. In this paper, the standard of existing pick up noise is established by finding the tonality, which is a psychoacoustic parameter, of noticeable limit sound level. Based on the findings of the method, the study has found factors which cause pick up noise and suggests the substitution of following components of printers such as spring constants, spring force, and the quality of friction pads. As a result, it is confirmed that the proposed pick up noise index has usefulness to classify whether existence of pick up noise with an objective evaluation and not to occur the noise based on design optimized combination of laser printer components.
