For years, there have been advances in Barcode scanning technology including the speed in which 1D and 2D barcodes are read.  You may start to ask yourself, how much faster really matters? Despite popular belief, users can distinguish even a tenth of a second difference in scan performance.  So with management pushing for more productivity, efficiency and profit, users are less patient and they expect instantaneous results.

Even if your jobs don’t require intensive sub-second barcode reading, do you really care how fast a barcode can be read?  It all centers on user productivity and satisfaction because a happy employee means you have a better chance for happy customers and more revenue.  The move to barcode scanning tablets with a much better user interface, higher performance and larger storage has raised the expectations so using a camera or an older scanner to read barcodes creates issues or inconveniences for the user:

• Properly aligning with a barcode that is potentially placed as low as the floor to above the user’s head.
• To hold it within the right range for reading (some cameras cannot be used closer than 2” but no further away than 4”.
• To hold still enough so the image is not blurred and the bars appear sharp enough to decode.

The latest 2D barcode reading technologies have 2 major features that makes scanning a breeze even with a handheld tablet:

1. As with all 2D barcode readers they are orientation independent, so unlike older laser scanners where you had to make the red line go all the way across the barcode and the white space on either side, 2D imagers take a picture. Then the decoding software finds the barcode and decodes it instantaneously.  The user no longer has alignment issues.
2. The newest high performance 2D barcode readers have extreme motion tolerance, allowing them to take the image without blurring (remember those pictures you would try to take out the window of a moving car or tracking a player at a sporting event). This allows a user to trigger the scanner and then move to the barcode and it will read as soon as it is in the proper range. No stopping required.

You have high dollar, highly productive users, so keep them happy and productive by equipping them with high performance tablets with barcode scanners.

Check out the new MobileDemand free Barcode Generator