Types of barcode labels

When barcode labels first entered the market several decades ago, designers had to think in a system to interpret and understand the symbols contained and represented by the black vertical lines. This way a plethora of codifications flooded the market in different business sectors, like retail, logistics, military, medicine and construction, just to name a few of them. Engineers and people in general found clever ways to use the invention to suit their needs.

The first barcode labels were designed with the capability to store only numbers, because they are a very small and finite group of symbols. After that, more symbols were added such as dots, commas and currency symbols. Barcode labels capable to store only numbers are called numeric-only barcodes, and are simply out of date in our era. Soon, capabilities of these barcode labels expanded to support several symbols, including letters. These labels were called alphanumeric barcodes and are the standard of our days.

Some decades after the first uses, another invention hit the market. It was a huge advancement over the barcodes known in those days. These barcodes were capable to store a huge amount of information in a single label. The secret was in the method of storage of the information, while the first labels could just represent one symbol per line, this new technique allowed to represent several symbols per line. They are the famous duo-dimensional barcode labels. These labels are used today in cases where a lot of information needs to be processed. This useful design has the drawback of its price. They are more expensive to manufacture than single-dimensional labels and the barcode scanners designed to read the duo-dimensional labels are also sold at higher prices. We would recommend you to choose this technology only if you have no other option, because the increase in the investment cost sometimes it is not justified with the increase in efficiency you could obtain.