A printing apparatus for printing an image onto a recording medium based on input image data, comprises an electrostatic latent image carrier for forming an electrostatic latent image, and an exposure controller for forming the electrostatic latent image corresponding to one pixel upon exposure of the electrostatic latent image carrier with a combination of a plurality of different exposure amounts, wherein the exposure controller performs the exposure with the combination of the plurality of exposure amounts in a manner to satisfy a condition for an index value LNR expressed by a following general equation (1) using an optical density od (n) standardized on the condition of the maximum optical density equal to 1.0, identification information comb assigned to identify each combination of the plurality of exposure amounts, and the number of varieties m of a cumulative exposure amount used for modulation of the image data. LNR ≤ 2 / m ⁢ ⁢ LNR ⁡ ( comb ) = ∑ n = 0 m - 3 ⁢ [ { ( od ⁡ ( n + 2 ) - od ⁡ ( n + 1 ) ) - ( od ⁢ ( n + 1 ) - od ⁡ ( n ) ) } 2 ] / ( m - 2 ) . ( 1 )