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What You Believe vs What You Know Regarding barcode quality, what you may believe isn’t necessarily the same as what you know. Using a smartphone to “verify” a barcode is a good example. “We [...]

Barcodes are a visual technology. A simple way to test a barcode is to look at it—it just makes sense. Here’s what to look for: Linear barcodes (parallel lines and spaces) always have bars of [...]

Here are the two most common reasons we hear for not buying a barcode verifier: Barcode verifiers are too expensive. It isn’t necessary to buy a barcode verifier because we’ve never had a [...]

1. My barcodes scan fine with my Smartphone By design, a barcode scanner must use a laser-emulating red light. Smartphones use ambient light or white light. Scanners cannot see anything printed [...]

Quality is always important. Challenging times make quality even more important. This also applies to barcode quality. Supply chains are always critical and arguably more so in challenging times. [...]

Recently we were asked why the important—and sometimes confusing—parameter Decodability appears in the ISO standard for 1D barcodes but not in the standard for 2D barcodes. Decodability is based [...]

Prevention comes from correction, to prevent the recurrence of everything you corrected. In reality, it’s more effective to consider the process variables and control them. Charting materials and [...]

The basic corrective actions for matrix barcodes are similar to those discussed in Part 2 of this series, which covers this topic for linear barcodes. You may wish to read that article, as we [...]

Two different, equally-important factors define barcode quality: Print quality Data structure ISO Standards define print quality. For linear barcodes (parallel lines and spaces) it is ISO 15416. [...]

Use of DPM barcodes is on the rise. For the unfamiliar, DPM is Direct Part Marking. It is used in applications where a label or tag won’t work. For example, an engine block or subassembly like an [...]