BPA In Receipt Paper

I’ve been reading Discover Magazine since high school, mostly because I’m a huge nerd, but also because their articles are tremendously fascinating. The Discover Magazine blogs are a great addendum, providing a different take on news items, and giving me something to read in the morning before work.

Today one of the bloggers reposted a study about BPA in receipt paper, and since that hits directly on our industry, I thought I’d share what we’re doing to help. I can’t make claims one way or the other on BPA, I’m not a scientist nor a statistician so my analysis would be weak at best. But if customers want BPA-free paper, we have options for them. We carry a couple types of thermal receipt paper, including BPA-free, so you can have the peace of mind that one less thing at your business has BPA in it.

iPhones and Barcode Scanners

So I’ve already made my claims to the problems with trying to use a cell phone camera as a barcode scanner. Mostly in that it’s lame and not good for more than a couple scans here and there. But we’re still getting customers with iPhones who want to track their inventory with the phone. So after much consternation, and two searches on Google for “iPhone Barcode Scanner”, we’ve got a couple units that should do what you need.

First up is the Socket Cordless Hand Scanner (CHS) Series 7 barcode scanner. Talk about a mouthful. We’ve actually had the CHS up on our site for a few years, but recently they upgraded the apparatus to run in human interface device (HID) mode with a special barcode you scan to configure it to communicate with iPhones, iPads, and iPods Touch (iPod Touches?) There’s also a method for it to work with Blackberries, so the CHS is a solid, rechargeable alternative to the Cipherlab 1660 barcode scanner.

This scanner comes with in 3 body designs: Standard for day to day use, rugged for rougher environments, and a rugged antimicrobial housing for healthcare applications. Tracking patient info is getting to be more important everyday, and giving employees the option to use this scanner with a smartphone they already own seems like a great alternative to buying an entirely new device. You also get your choice of standard or high-powered 1D laser or 2D imager as your scanning method, so the CHS 7 definitely can be scaled to meet your exact needs.

Not to be outdone, the Motorola CS3070, when in Bluetooth HID mode, also connects & communicates with iPhones. This is the combo batch & bluetooth scanner that replaced the aging CS1504 and can hold far more barcodes than is necessary while in batch mode.

Though it has only a 1D laser scanner option, the CS3070’s scanner is pretty burly. On a UPC-A barcode, what you see on pretty much every consumer product ever, I was able to scan from about 2 feet away with no problems. Motorola knows laser scanning, and the CS3070 is no exception.

We’re still hacking away on the demo units we have, in an effort to make setup as painless as possible.

Honeywell Barcode Scanner Retirements

With the advent of the Honeywell Xenon, a big chunk of the former HHP and Motorola 2D barcode scanners are now redundant. Honeywell’s decided to let them run for a while before taking them to the farm upstate, and I’m sure customers appreciate that plan as opposed to pulling them from shelves immediately.

It really boils down to the 4206, FocusBT, Focus, 4600, and 4820 being replaced by the Xenon, but there are some specifics, such as which type of imager is replaced and so on. I’ll put a big table breaking down the specific scanner part numbers, but not the kits.

Focus/FocusBT: For a while (like right when I started), the Focus & its cordless brother was the go-to 2D barcode scanner for us. It was reasonably priced & pretty good at scanning messed up barcodes. Once they added EasyDL (formerly EasyID) for driver’s license parsing, the scanner became a staple at Targets across the universe. Getting a customer set up for a rewards program or even a credit application is wicked easy when you just have to scan the back of an ID instead of hand type it.

4600/4820: These came from the HHP side of the family, and they are some burly barcode scanners. They came in quite a few flavors, including standard range, special focus, and high density models, so they were great at certain scanning situations as opposed to okay at all of them. The 4600g lineup had disinfectant-ready options, in case you needed a scanner at your hospital & wanted to be sure it was completely cleanable after someone got sick on it. The 4600r was a bit more high-end, giving you the option of downloading configurations and a quick autoscan mode for presentation scanning.

Here’s the table breakdown. Most products got replaced by the standard range Xenon, but there are some differences in there. If you have a kitted model, just check out the part number on your barcode scanner, and it should be in this list.

What you had	What you should get
4600g
4600GSR031CE	1900gSR-2
4600GSR051CE	1900gSR-2
4600GSR151CE	1900gSR-2
4600GSF031CE	1900gSR-2
4600GSF051CE	1900gSR-2
4600GSF151CE	1900gSR-2
4600GHD051CE	1900gHD-2
4600GHD151CE	1900gHD-2
4600GHDH051C	1900hHD-0
4600r
4600RSR051CE	1900gSR-2
4600RSR151CE	1900gSR-2
4600RSF051CE	1900gSR-2
4600RSF151CE	1900gSR-2
Focus 1690
MS1690-106	1900gSR-2
MS1690-14	1900gSR-2
MS1690-38	1900gSR-2
MS1690-47	1900gSR-2
MS1690-40	1900gSR-2
MS1690-62	1900gSR-2
4206
4206GHD051C	1900gHD-2
4206GSF051C	1900gSR-2
4206GSR051C	1900gSR-2
4820
4820HDH0C1CBE	1902hHD-0
4820HDHM	1902hHD-0
4820SF0C1CBE	1902gSR-2
4820SR0C1CBE	1902gSR-2
FocusBT 1633
MS1633-5	1902gSR-2

Quite a big list for just the scanner units. The kits would’ve easily quadrupled this in size.