I used to get baffled by the way sales clerks would ring up your total merely by flashing a ray of sharp light across some lines they called the barcode. And invariably they were alway right — the barcode scanner did all the work for them while they were on their cell phones finalizing their weekend program.
It took me a while to figure out that all that the scanner does is ‘deciphers the optical impulses (the thick and thin black lines) on the product and translates them into electrical ones’ which are picked up by a sensor. The sensor, in turn, compares the impulses with a database and comes out with a number — that’s nthing but the dollar figure I have to shell out.
Of course they’re accurate, or else they wouldn’t be there in the first place. But how accurate are they when compared with a human operation for the same process (besides the obvious advantage in time saving)?
In my research, I came across some astounding results:
For instance, for every 1,000 character manually keyed in by a human operator, there are an average of 10 keying errors. Statistics also tells us that the optical reader in the barcode scanner makes one error in 10,000 passes. A wand, or a simple pen barcode reader figures at one error in three million characters, and the laser scanner has a mind blowing accuracy of one error in 70 million.
And come to think of it, there are literally hundreds of types of barcode scanners, such as handhelds, contacts, mobile, wireless, ultra scans, what not. Not to mention the accessories.
However, with all those proven technology, I’m still waiting for the day when I can prove a barcode scanner has wrongly read out the price.
When that happens, I’ll post it here.
