Barcode imagers (also known as digital or area imagers) read both 1D and 2D barcodes using sensors that have rows of cells. They’re proliferating with 2D barcodes that embed more information than ...

Christoph Wagner is the CEO of Scanbot SDK, a software development company specializing in data capture software for mobile and web apps. Considering how quickly retail is changing, it is astounding ...

Anyone who has seen a barcode knows what they are instinctively. That irregular pattern of thick and thin lines across the back of a product or on a label is hard to mistake for anything else. With ...

Benjamin Claeys is CEO of QR TIGER, MENU TIGER and GiftLips. He also hosts Stay QRious, a podcast about QR code best practices. Barcodes have been a staple of commerce since the first UPC barcode was ...

Before the barcode was introduced, managing inventory from label to self to checkout was time consuming and manual. Not only was this process inefficient, but there ...

Special thanks to Marcella Michalek, a former summer associate at Foley, for her contributions to this article. When introduced nearly fifty years ago, the Universal Product Code (UPC)—the most ...

Barcodes work based on light reflected back to scanner optics: black does not reflect light, while the white (blank) spaces do reflect light. Because characters (alphabetic, numeric, special) are ...