UPC and EAN Barcode Notes

Random UPC barcode research.

If I understand correctly, UPC was first, and it was USA focused. A few years later, EAN was designed to supercede UPC, all UPC codes are also valid in the EAN spec (grandfathered somehow), but not the reverse. "UPC version A (the common one) symbols have 10 digits plus two overhead digits while EAN symbols have 12 digits and one overhead digit."

North American's just call everything a UPC though - which is wrong, and thus, confusing.

UPC's are NUMBERS only. No letters.
UPC displayed digits pattern: w-xxxxx-yyyyy-z
EAN pattern: x-yyyyyy-zzzzzz
"If you must use UPC or EAN for the internal application, then you need to use one of the prefixes that the GS1 has set aside for internal use. See the table, and look for the prefixes that say "Restricted distribution (MO defined)"
"the nominal size of a UPC symbol is 1.469" wide x 1.02" high. The minimum recommended size is 80% of the nominal size or 1.175" wide x .816" high. The maximum recommended size is 200% of the nominal size or 2.938" wide x 2.04" high."
From this site - http://www.adams1.com/faq.html

Prefix table - http://www.gs1.org/company-prefix
- 020 - 029 - Restricted circulation numbers within a geographic region (MO defined)
- 040 - 049 - Restricted circulation numbers within a company
I guess this is what a company should use internally? Read on. Wikipedia says 020-029 is typically used.
"The 020-029 GS1 Prefixes are worth a special mention. GS1 defines this as being available for retailer internal use (or internal use by other types of business). Some retailers use this for proprietary (own brand or unbranded) products, although many retailers obtain their own manufacturer's code for their own brands. Other retailers use at least part of this prefix for products which are packaged in store, for example, items weighed and served over a counter for a customer. In this cases, the barcode may encode a price, quantity or weight along with a product identifier - in a retailer defined way. The product identifier may be one assigned by the Produce Electronic Identification Board (PEIB) or may be retailer assigned. Retailers, who have historically used UPC barcodes, will tend to use GS1 prefixes 02? for store packaged products."
"Note that EAN-13 codes beginning with 0 are actually 12-digit UPC codes with prepended 0 digit. In the last few years, more products sold by retailers outside United States and Canada have been using EAN-13 codes beginning with 0, since they were generated by GS1-US."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number_(EAN)

OT: Not sure if I need to be worried or not:

LED lighting can lead to bad laser scanner reads?! - https://support.honeywellaidc.com/s/article/Considerations-when-Introducing-LED-illumination-in-to-the-area-where-barcodes-are-being-scanned - "Laser scanners were traditionally designed with a very specific “light flicker” frequency response. The bandwidth of this response only accepts the flicker frequencies observed by the scanners laser spot when traversing bars and spaces of a bar code... The spot speed of the scanning laser and detection hardware are all harmonized to ONLY amplify and process these specific frequencies. This provide a good overall ambient filtering and avoided cross talk from other light sources. Before LED lightning, laser scanning products always proved to be very robust in most lighting environments including compact fluorescent lighting. However with the introduction of new wide spread LED technologies the flicker frequencies generated by these new fixtures are often almost dead center of a laser scanners frequency range causing the ambient LED lighting will appear to the scanner as fake bars and spaces preventing to decode the bar code. "

tags: barcode,