In the not-so-distant past, manufacturers using laser scanners and conventional area-scan image based readers had to put up with inherent technology limitations. Laser scanners, for example, have a hard time reading barcodes through plastic shrink-wrap, barcodes printed on flexible material such as plastic bags, and damaged barcodes. When reading 2-D barcodes, manufacturers had to turn to conventional area-scan image-based readers, which come with depth of field limitations that make it difficult to read codes without controlling the distance between the barcode and the reader.

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Cognex Corp.