Barcodes, long used in the retail world for inventory tracking and quick information retrieval, are becoming incredibly popular in a number of residential applications. Thanks to handheld barcode technology and capable printers, the convenience of barcodes can offer many benefits to those with large collections of movies and music, or in many other situations where information needs to be attached to physical products. If you're curious about how this technology works, read on to understand the benefits offered by handheld barcode scanners in your home or business.
Barcodes are a series of black lines which are displayed either on labels afixed to physical items or, in some instances, displayed on computer screens. Barcode scanners employ lasers or other scanning technologies to read these labels, decoding them in a standard way into a series of letters and numbers. By cross-referencing these codes with a database, barcodes can be used to connect physical items with arbitrary collections of information. You could, for instance, attach information such as date and price of purchase to items in a collection. This makes information retrieval much simpler, as the needed data is practically attached to the item in question.
This technology has been used for many years in retail establishments. By tagging items with their price, and by writing point-of-sale software to quickly total the prices as read, checkout processes have been dramatically sped up. For many years, however, this technology was quite unwieldy, so its applications were limited to situations where the space requirements could justify the benefits.
This balance has shifted with the introduction of handheld barcode scanners. Utilizing traditional scanning technologies in some instances, or high-resolution cameras in others, these scanners either decode directly on their included hardware, or send the resulting images to other computers via USB. The results are made available to any number of applications that provide rich services not otherwise possible.
One such mashup combines databases of products, shopping sites and maps to provide quick and convenient comparison shopping both locally and online. By walking into a store, capturing a photo of a barcode and relaying that photo either to a barcode scanner or third party website, the code can be matched with a product. Once that is done, the product's price and other details can be searched for online, providing competitor's prices and locations overlaid onto maps. Such services would be much less practical were it not for the abilities of handheld barcode scanners.
This technology has become increasingly popular in recent years, with a variety of consumer companies offering handheld scanners at many price points. Such companies include Metrologic, HP, Symbol and Opticon. Laser and image scanning are just a few of the many methods available for scanning barcodes, each of which features various advantages and disadvantages. Also, the unit appropriate for your situation will depend on the type of barcode being scanned.
Whether you are a residential user with a large collection or a small business selling physical products, barcodes are an incredibly useful technology, and handheld scanners make them even more so. If you're looking for a way to conveniently index a large number of objects, you owe it to yourself to explore what handheld barcode scanners have to offer.
