Re: Handheld bar code scanners

I agree with everything that Scott said. I used to work with the
PTC-960SL scanners (and PTC-960XDS before that) but that was five years
ago. I would add that in addition to the hardware you pay close attention
to the 5250 client software, especially on Windows CE devices. Five years
ago I evaluated several Windows CE devices and 5250 clients. There always
seemed to be a disconnect between the hardware and the client. Like Scott
said, it's easy for the users to get caught up in scanning and not see a
message until later and who's to say at what point the message was
generated? The PTC-960 scanners ran DOS but when an input-inhibited
message was displayed it turned off the laser on the scanner. When they
pull the trigger and nothing happens the first thing the user does is read
the screen. The Windows CE devices that I saw didn't do that.

The scrolling on the PTC-960's also "jumped" the screen to the field that
the cursor was on. This allowed you to divide the screen into quadrants.
Once the last field on the first quadrant was filled the client
automatically moved the screen to the quadrant with the field waiting for
input. Again, something that I never saw with a Windows CE scanner.

Hopefully the state of the art has improved a bit over the years. Still,
be aware when evaluating devices.


Dave Parnin