Barcode Quality Policy

Best practices for any company involved in barcoding is to have a barcode quality policy. Who is a company “…involved in barcoding…? The short answer is any company with potential liability if a barcode does not perform as it should. That includes everybody who touches that barcode, from the graphics designer, the pre-press service, the [...]

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Barcode Scanner Differences

Why do different barcode scanners behave differently? Even some scanners of the same brand and model behave differently. Why is this? Barcode scanners, like other devices, are manufactured to a specification, and every specification has a tolerance or margin of acceptable performance error. This is why even otherwise “identical” scanners of the same make and [...]

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How to Check Barcode Quality

Barcodes are everywhere. Today there are barcodes on medications, patient wristbands, airline boarding passes and luggage tags, manufacturing sub-assemblies such a circuit boards and components, automotive parts, documents and files in law offices and medical practices, tickets to movies, concerts and sports events—just about everywhere. When this technology was new, you could only find barcodes [...]

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On the Demise of Barcoding

MEMO TO EVERYONE who predicted the death of barcoding, whether because of the rise of RFID technology, automatic product recognition, Near Field Communication or (fill in the blank): Barcode technology is anything but dying. Witness the collaboration which is taking place between GS1 and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). GS1 Global is the worldwide supply [...]

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Barcode Verification – The Business Case

This is not the first time we have talked about the business case for barcode verification. It is a subject that will arise again and again because bar code testing is an all-at-once expense; barcode quality problems often develop slowly over a longer period of time. There is human psychology at work here: the most [...]

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Verifying Compliance Labels

The lab at Barcode-Test LLC receives a lot of compliance labels for verification. We see all sorts of problems, some of them quite unexpected, and we often wonder what the label printer was thinking. This is especially mystifying considering that virtually every retailer with more than one store has a compliance label specification or at [...]

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Barcode Verifiers – What They Don’t Do

A friend sent me an image of a UPC symbol that “did not scan right” (his words) at the local big box store. As a barcode quality guy, I’m always on the lookout for problem barcodes; friends and family are my best detectives. However, in this case “did not scan right” meant something different to [...]

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Barcode Verifiers – The Business Case

The fact that bar codes are so ubiquitous today is the business case for barcode verifiers. When you say “ubiquitous” most people readily agree and yet still not comprehend the width and depth of the presence of bar codes in virtually every human endeavor. Everybody knows about bar codes used to track product movement in [...]

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Continuous Scanning Barcode Verifiers – Why They are Better

Most of the barcode verifiers available are of the one-scan/one verification report variety. There may be technical reasons for this besides the fact that this is the way it has always been done. That is probably because most hand held scanners are like that, and there is “distant cousin” sort of kinship between scanners and [...]

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The Best Entry-Level Bar Code Verifier

Nobody wants to spend more than necessary on a bar code verifier, and now that the Honeywell (HHP) QuickCheck is history, what is the best entry-level bar code verifier replacement? In the Product Retirement announcement, Honeywell specifically recommended Axicon verifiers—but were they right? Let’s take a look. Let’s be honest about the QuickCheck. It was [...]

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