Items Cross Paths With Barcode Scanners Every Step of the Way

It's pretty hard to imagine what life would be like without barcode scanners

. Everything you buy has at some point been processed through some kind of barcode scanning technology. The easiest place to see this is at the check out counter of any store. Either the checker slides the item over the light panel to read the product information or where self-service check out is available you do it yourself. If you look around your home you'll see barcodes on everything from a can of vegetables to a tube of toothpaste. In that one little black and white block of symbols is everything a merchant needs to know about the product.

Another good way to imagine barcode scanners in action is package shipping. You buy a product online. The information is sent to the distribution center where the product it pulled from the shelf. Once it's pulled it is scanned and your order sheet matched up to the product information. It's boxed up and another barcode label is put on the box where the shipper scans it and makes a record of when it left the warehouse. Along the way the box is scanned again and again until it reaches the final destination. That's plenty of scanning and doesn't even count the number of times it was run through barcode scanners before you ever even placed your order.

Today barcode scanners are so widespread that we take them for granted. It would be pretty difficult to go back to the paper and pen way of tracking items that was used before the technology became affordable and accessible. If you are over 40 years old you may even remember what it was like to go to the grocery store and the checkout clerk would actually punch in the prices for each and every item. Some of those checkers were pretty fast but they could never match speed with today's lightening fast barcode scanners.

All this convenience is made possible by a relatively simple mechanism. A typical scanner is really made up of three key parts. The part you normally see is the wand, pen, or platen that houses the illumination system. Red lights are use to read the shape of the barcode. These will be either LED lights or laser light. Once the light is passed across the code it is reflected back to a sensor. The sensor will convert the light signal from analog to digital. The information then goes to a decoder which translates the information into something that a computer can use. By either hardwire or wireless technology the information is sent to a computer where it becomes part of a database that keeps track of the movements of the product.

If you start to notice bar code scanners you will notice that there are several different kinds. The simplest and least expensive are pencil type readers that must be dragged across the barcode. The most sophisticated are the large laser scanners that you might see in a state of the art large discount retailer. Whatever type of scanner you see it's job is the sameread and store information about a product. So that the check points along the distribution channel know when they need to make or order more and how the item is doing in terms of getting to the end user.

Items Cross Paths With Barcode Scanners Every Step of the Way

By: Malcolm Nguyen

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