Patent US 4,812,918

A dot-matrix pinter is adapted to include an optical scanner for opto-electrically sensing the optical intensity levels of an image-bearing medium in order to provide a digitized representation of the image. The sensor can be mounted on a housing in the printer for continuous linear movement across the image while the sensor is scanning. Sampling means responsive to the printer strobe command signal is provided for sampling the output of the sensor at predetermined intervals. This output is loaded line by line into a memory buffer. Means for processing the sampled output of the sensor into a form compatible with a dot-matrix printer is also provided. A method of generating a digitized representation of an image using a dot-matrix printer adapted to include an optical scanner for optoelectrically scanning the optical intensity levels of an image-bearing medium is also provided. The representation can have either bilevel or gray-scale quality. In the case of gray-scale quality, the representation of the original image has more than one pixel space for containing dots corresponding to each sampled pixel in the original image whereby gray-scale resolution is provided by the distribution of dots in the reproduced image.