Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energise your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimise plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organisation to better manage and optimise your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
Zebra’s line of kiosks can meet any self-service or digital signage need, from checking prices and stock on an in-aisle store kiosk to fully-featured kiosks that can be deployed on the wall, counter, desktop or floor in a retail store, hotel, airport check-in gate, physician’s office, local government office and more.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customise your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labour costs low, your talent happy and your organisation compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritised task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
Get full visibility of your inventory and automatically pinpoint leaks across all channels.
Reduce uncertainty when you anticipate market volatility. Predict, plan and stay agile to align inventory with shifting demand.
Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
Explore Zebra’s printer software to integrate, manage and monitor printers easily, maximising IT resources and minimising down time.
Make the most of every stage of your scanning journey from deployment to optimisation. Zebra's barcode scanner software lets you keep devices current and adapt them to your business needs for a stronger ROI across the full lifecycle.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
Zebra DNA is the industry’s broadest suite of enterprise software that delivers an ideal experience for all during the entire lifetime of every Zebra device.
Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
The Zebra Aurora suite of machine vision software enables users to solve their track-and-trace, vision inspection and industrial automation needs.
Zebra Aurora Focus brings a new level of simplicity to controlling enterprise-wide manufacturing and logistics automation solutions. With this powerful interface, it’s easy to set up, deploy and run Zebra’s Fixed Industrial Scanners and Machine Vision Smart Cameras, eliminating the need for different tools and reducing training and deployment time.
Aurora Imaging Library™, formerly Matrox Imaging Library, machine-vision software development kit (SDK) has a deep collection of tools for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving. Code-level customization starts here.
Aurora Design Assistant™, formerly Matrox Design Assistant, integrated development environment (IDE) is a flowchart-based platform for building machine vision applications, with templates to speed up development and bring solutions online quicker.
Designed for experienced programmers proficient in vision applications, Aurora Vision Library provides the same sophisticated functionality as our Aurora Vision Studio software but presented in programming language.
Aurora Vision Studio, an image processing software for machine & computer vision engineers, allows quick creation, integration & monitoring of powerful OEM vision applications.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximise productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
2D barcode labels offer significant advantages over traditional 1D barcodes. A 2D barcode is a graphical image that holds information in its design, not only from left to right but also from top to bottom.
2D stands for two-dimensional and a 2D barcode contains information in both the horizontal and the vertical unlike traditional barcodes which are vertical black and white lines and contain a lot less data. A 2D barcode also physically looks different compared to a traditional linear 1D barcode.
Below are two of the typical 2D barcodes that you will see.
In terms of data capture, a 1D barcode can capture a series of digits, like a serial number but a 2D barcode can capture anywhere up to over 7000 characters so it can contain a high amount of information within the barcode itself.
Traditionally, with a 1D barcode, if you are capturing a serial number or information, you would have to connect back to a server and your device would have to connect back to get any information associated with that serial number. With 2D Barcodes, all the information can be contained within the barcode so it can be anything such as a product name, product color, category, any information you want and you do not need to connect back to a server to collect the data.
There are many applications for a 2D barcode that can be used across various industries.
2D barcodes can bring a lot of value to retailers, a good example is their use within grocery stores which could add 2D barcodes. For example, to their meat products which means they can add a lot more information in the barcodes such as expiry date and batch information which in turn could support the reduction in the amount of product recalls, food wastage and selling goods that are expired.
There are a lot of synergies between Healthcare and Manufacturing when it comes to 2D barcodes, For example, 2D barcodes can be used for the traceability of pharmaceuticals and authentication but on top of that barcodes can be etched into metal so the 2D barcodes could be etched into. For example, a stent in healthcare or a very small metal item in manufacturing, so it can assist in traceability.
Often warehouses are getting products coming in with 2D barcodes already on them so if they have a small parcel. For example, it may have a 2D barcode displayed on the delivery label and the barcode and information can be easily scanned and parsed immediately without connecting to any backend or third-party systems.
In pharmaceuticals, they tend to have very small containers and you can fit a 2D barcode in a very small spot so you can get a lot of information into a small space and the kind of information you can get such as a serial number, batch information, product description and even a URL from which you could look up more information on that product.
There are a lot of benefits to the supply chain as a result of having access to that information. When it comes to scanning those barcodes. Traditionally, there were 1D laser scanners which were designed for scanning the 1D barcodes so it was a laser line that went across every line of the barcode and would decode that barcode.
With society changing, we are all carrying out mobile phones around with us and now we see mobile barcodes on our phones for various reasons and this is another advantage of 2D imagers as they can scan off backlit devices, such as mobile phones. Traditional 1D laser scanners cannot scan off a backlit device so a 2D imager has an additional advantage and if you think about the example of checking out at a supermarket, you have probably got your points card on your phone so you have a barcode and you want to be able to scan quickly when you check out and that is where a 2D imager can help.
With a 2D barcode, you need a 2D imager which is dedicated to scanning both 1D and 2D barcode labels and it is a camera that will take a photo of the barcode and decode it very fast and with great accuracy.
2D imagers nowadays are just as fast as 1D lasers and they are the go-to scan engine not only because they are just as fast as 1D so there is no detriment to going to 2D. There are a number of benefits that come with a 2D imager.
An operator traditionally with a handheld 1D scanner with a single line would have to line up the barcode with the scanner but with 2D imager scanner, you do not have to worry about orientation meaning you can scan upside-down, the right way up, the camera sees the barcode in 2D and can decode it in any orientation and also 1D barcodes as well so even if you have got 1D barcodes, you still get a benefit by having a 2D imager scanning the 1D barcode because of any orientation, it's going to be able to decode it.
All you need is a 2D Imager and at Zebra we have a range of 2D imagers in most of our portfolio of products including barcode scanners, mobile computers, tablets and scanner scales. You will need an image-based scanning engine in your device to capture 2D barcodes.
A 2D imager can scan 2D barcodes, it can also scan 1D barcodes. In addition, scanning in direct sunlight, with a laser, if the sunlight is too bright, the laser will be washed down and you won't be able to decode the barcode. With a 2D imager, it doesn't matter how bright the sun is, you can still decode the barcode outside.
A 1D scanner will have difficulty scanning dirty or damaged barcodes.
Another example is the loyalty barcode on your mobile phone, you go to the checkout at a grocery store and you try and scan the mobile phone on the scanner scale and nothing is scanning, you're stuck with a laser scanner. With a 2D imager, even on the scanner scale, there are bioptic images in there that you can scan a mobile phone.
Speed of scanning is another benefit, you may have had a situation where you've had your mobile phone and you want to scan a QR code off of a poster and you are holding your camera there for a few seconds before it decodes.
Zebra has dedicated imagers for scanning 2D barcodes and it's not just the hardware, we have algorithms inside our devices that are designed for scanning for accuracy and speed so it's the fastest you are ever going to decode a barcode.
Explore Zebra's Range of 2D Imagers
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2024 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.