The Intermec (now Honeywell) EA30 scanner has a really great feature. It is a camera based scanner, so it can read both 1D (UPC, Code 128, Code 39) and 2D (Datamatrix, QR Code, Postnet) codes. It has a bright white illuminator and a laser aimer that looks like this:
It’s now common for a labels to have multiple bar codes on them and it can be difficult to scan only the one you intend, especially if they are crowded together:
You can enable Center Decoding in the EA30 using EasySet (under Operating Settings, Data Decode Security, Center Decoding) that instructs the scanner to only decode a symbol when the center dot on the aiming pattern is on a barcode.
So this will read:
And this will not:
It’s pretty intuitive, aim the dot where you want to scan. If you ever have to scan a large number of bar codes during a shipping or receiving transaction, serial numbers for example, this feature can save a lot of time and aggravation.
There are other scanners that have a feature that is similar to center decoding in the EA30, but without the center aiming dot, they’re difficult to use, and some scanners depth of field (range, or scanning distance) is reduced when you turn centering on. This doesn’t happen with the EA30.
There are other nice features in the EA30 that I’ll cover in later posts.
The EA30 scan engine in available in the SG20 tethered and wireless scanners, and the CK3 hand held computer.