Symbol Video Review-a-thon

Hey check it out, this time we’re covering the Symbol LS4208, LS4278, and LS3008. Just for a quick rundown:

LS4208: Good for higher volume retail. It scans pretty quickly, and is aggressive. It is a little spendy, but it’s going to give you more bang for your buck than the less expensive scanners.

LS4278: The cordless version of the LS4208. It has a 70 foot range and built-in rechargeable battery. It’s not ruggedized, so it’d be better at home in retail environments as opposed to warehouses.

LS3008: Not only is it yellow, but it has an IP54 seal, so it can be sanitized pretty easily. I like to think of IP54 as making things “sneezeproof.”

All three can shoot a secondary rasterized laser pattern. Rasterization, in POS, is using mirrors to propagate a laser into more places. All laser barcode scanners do this by design, otherwise it’d just be a dot shooting out of the scanner. The secondary one on these barcode scanners gets the beam to wave up and down, helping increase accuracy on crappy barcodes, and gives certain models an easy way to scan PDF417 barcodes, which are 2 dimensional.

Yeah, the video’s a little washed out. We’re working on a location that provides more even lighting, while not sounding as echo-y.

Motorola Scanvisor

Given my position as glad hander, manufacturer buddy, and product manager, I get to see a lot of the new stuff manufacturers are trying, generally on the day it’s released.

The Motorola Scanvisor is a pretty new thing from our Motorolian/Symboliotic friends. Motorymbol’s doing a lot to help the customer tell the difference between their product line and intended uses, and I know our sales staff and the end user are going to really dig it. For instance, it doesn’t seem like there are huge differences between the Symbol LS4208 and LS3008 aside from the paint job. Bright yellow=industrial, btw. The scan engines are comparable, they have similar warranties, but the LS3008 is designed for environments needing sterile equipment and can be cleaned with no ill harm. I kind of want to toss one in the dish washer and see how it fares.

I know this just from hacking through data sheets, spec information, and putting the products on the site. Customers aren’t going to have such an intimate knowledge of barcode scanners, and maybe our categorization doesn’t match their industry properly. The ScanVisor now lets them search by industry, environment, and myriad other uses as well as let them compare products. And it’s all in flash, which, as we know, is one of the many ways to tell if something’s high-tech.

I’d really like to apply a similar technique to our product review data so customers can find the right scanner with minimal work. Maybe have some input fields for different values, such as scan range, wireless capability, seal specification, etc. So then if they need a barcode scanner that can read from contact to 8 inches and has bluetooth capabilities, they can get a Metrologic FocusBT or Symbol LS4278.

Regarding the request for video of barcode scanner chucking, it’ll have to wait until I can find our Hi8 camera. But it should be awesome. Really really awesome.