Ziath (6)
Contains articles regarding the company
The Hidden Technology in your Ziath 2D Barcode Scanner
Written by David Anstee
One of my first thoughts when I joined Ziath was, how difficult can scanning a 2D barcode really be?
As I soon discovered, it’s much more complicated than you’d probably imagine! Though barcode scanning may seem like an ordinary, mundane task, truth is, our R&D department are constantly coming up with new features to make it as painless as possible for our customers. Poorly printed barcodes, racks holding tubes at varying heights above the scanning window, needing to differentiate between dust particles on the window and a barcode and the ability to cope with harsh overhead lighting are just a few of the challenges that our scanners face. Whilst pondering on this I realised that many of our customers probably don’t know the inner workings of their Ziath 2D barcode scanner, so I thought I’d share a few backend features with you today.
Most of our customers find the setup of our scanner simple and easy and don’t need our help to get it working (though if you ever get stuck get in touch please; we’re only an email/phone call/carrier pigeon away!). You should find that our scanners are easy to get up and running but did you know that there are a number of cool options you can use to customise your scanner’s behaviour? I’m going to list out some of the less well known features below:
Every single 2D rack scanner manufacturer will tell you their scanner will never ever fail; including us. However in reality no matter how robust our decoding algoritms (and we put a lot of work into this area) sometimes a rack just won't decode. So; I thought I would list the main reasons we see below:
My baby son recently broke my glasses; turns out that they don't bend backwards! So I went to the opticians and while selecting my glasses the saleswoman (Denise) in the shop asked what I did for a living; I replied that we make specialist barcode scanners used in medical research (easier to explain than biobanking!). She replied 'Why?' and I flippantly replied back 'to pay the mortgage and put food on the table'. So Denise patiently smiled at me and said 'no, why do people need specialise barcode scanners. I apologised and explained about 2D tubes and sample storage and Denise used this information to pick out a pair of glasses which are suitable for work (BTW until the glasses are ready I'm wearing sunglasses at my desk).
