DISCRIMINATING SYSTEM FOR PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF PRINT

PURPOSE:To contrive prevention of duplicated printing or unintended skip printing, by discriminating a given condition as presence of print, absence of print or unsettled, based on a signal from a print presence/absence detecting element. CONSTITUTION:Print presence/absence information detected by a print presence/absence detecting element 1 is sent to a print presence/absence discriminating part 2. The discriminating part 2 discriminates a given condition as one of three conditions, namely, presence of print, unsettled and absence of print, and the discrimination result is sent to a controlling part 3, which can take an optimum measure according to the given one of the three conditions. For example, information discriminated as unsettled with respect to the presence or absence of print may be processed by a passbook printer, or may be processed by sending it to a host device. The processing may be flexibly designed according to the type of transaction, the amount of transaction or the like, whereby it is possible to efficiently guide the user to a window or the like. Thus, when the discrimination of the presence or absence of print is impossible, the condition may be discriminated as unsettled, followed by determination of the subsequent disposition, so that it is possible to avoid unintended skip printing or duplicated printing, which has been generated in a conventional system.