Get A Barcode Scanner Working For You

If you are the proud owner of a manufacturing, retail, or healthcare company, you owe it to yourself to explore the world of barcode scanners and the related solutions this technology holds for your business success.

The advent of barcodes has revolutionized the running and management of businesses large and small. In the early days it was the big companies who saw the need, paid for research and development and pioneered their early use.

Today, there are systems specifically designed for small business which are not simply scaled-down versions of what the conglomerates use. Their complete affordability, coupled with the long-term elimination of tedious record-keeping, makes their implementation a complete necessity.

Basically a barcode reader consists of a light source, a lens, and a sensor that can translate optical impulses into electrical impulses. In addition they can decode and analyze the image data and then send the barcode information to the output port.

There are several types of barcode readers, or scanners as they are also called. They all work basically the same, but require the humans operating them to do just a little work.

As the name suggests, a pen type reader looks very much like an ordinary pen, but in fact houses a light source and a photodiode in the tip. The human operator must move the end across the black and white bars with a steady hand. The dark bars absorb light and the white spaces reflect light and a voltage waveform is generated. This waveform is decoded in a similar manner to the way dots and dashes are decoded in Morse code.

A laser scanner uses a photodiode to measure the light reflected from the bar code as well. However the light source here is a laser beam, with either a prism or a mirror to scan back and forth across the bar code. Most of these types are semi-automatic and held in the operator's hand.

LED scanners, also called CCD readers utilize hundreds of little light sensors which are lined up in the head of the reader. Each of these sensors is like a single photodiode measuring the light directly in front of it. These hundreds of sensors create a voltage pattern identical to the pattern in the bar code.

Your video camera also uses the same CCD technology as does the CCD barcode reader, except the camera has hundreds of rows of sensors arranged two-dimensionally so that an image is generated.

The newest barcode scanner technology to date are 2D imaging scanners which use a tiny video camera to capture the barcode image. The code is then decoded using digital image processing techniques.

To solve the problem of wrinkled, torn, or poorly printed barcodes, the omni-directional scanner was developed. It uses a series of straight and curved scanning lines, so that at least one will cross all of the barcode lines and spaces. This type of reader also has the distinct advantage of being able to read something up very close, or a product in a warehouse that's metres or a few feet away.

No matter what your company's needs are, there is a barcode scanner that will work for you. Combined with the correct software, and an appropriate printer, these systems are designed to be user friendly right out of the box. Now you can forget tedious manual record keeping and get back to running your business.

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