Hi this is Travis with POSGuys.com.
Today we are looking at barcodes and can you improve a 1D barcode.
2D barcodes have become very popular because they're omnidirectional so when you scan you
don't have to line it up perfectly.
You can scan it from any angle and it is just much more productive.
You spend lest time aiming and more time scanning.
So if you look at barcode, it is just
a series of lines that are varied thickness
and then the gap.
So what it is reading is a thin line, a thick gap, a thick line, a thick gap, and so on
and that is how it determines what is the information on the barcode.
Generally people think of barcodes as lines but what it really is to a barcode scanner
is dots.
Its only reading a very small horizontal line.
So what it actually is is dots.
Rather than lines.
So they extended out the lines to give you more margin for error.
Instead of having to go perfectly on that line you can go up and down a little more.
It adds more accuracy.Theoretically what you could do to make an easier to read barcode
scanner from all angles is instead of just going with straight lines is you could curve
it.
So if you curve it up 90 degrees.
Now when your barcode scanner reads it, you can read this way, or you can read that way.
Which would be like that so you kind of have, the barcode scanner can read that way or it
can read that way.
If you spin it 360 degrees you get a circle.
With a perfectly spherical barcode you then get 2d omnidirectional scanning capabilities.
Here we have an LI2208 1D barcode scanner.
So it is just a single line.
On a 90 degree barcode it gets the one barcode and it gets the other barcode.
When you are off
even with the turned barcode at off angles it still struggles a little bit.
Here we took the same barcode, information on here is the same as the information on
here, and we spun it 360 degrees.
Now we have omnidirectional scanning with a single dimensional scanner.
Again the same barcode, we just shrunk it down a little bit
and we shrunk it down even more.
So this is about the size of your standard UPC label on a product
and this is your standard retail 1D barcode scanner.
Much more effective barcode scanning without having to have an expensive 2D scanner.
So it is just another possibility for barcodes out there.
So the circular barcode seems perfect right?
Why don't they replace linear barcodes with circular barcodes?
The reason is printing.
When you print, a printer prints like a barcode reads.
It does single dots going across so when you need solid lines at certain angles it has
to print dots, and more dots and more dots to give the illusion of being a circle.
It doesn't actually drag a pen all the way around.
If you don't have a high enough dot per inch printer then instead of a nice solid line
you're gonna get jagged lines and it wouldn't be as easy to read.
A high DPI printer, a good thermal transfer printer, with really high DPI would produce
really nice barcodes, be easy to read.
2D barcode scanners are also coming down in price so at some point it is going to be cheaper
to have a better scanner and cheaper barcodes then to print better barcodes and have a cheaper
scanner.
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