Portable 2D Barcode Recognizer

Every commercial product is fitted with its own personal identification label, which is known as a barcode. Throughout time, these have evolved in different style, with some even readable by your mobile phone. To test them out on a computer, Portable 2D Barcode Recognizer come with the means to read various types.

Visual design, and perks of portability

Just as the name clearly states, the application requires no installation in order to function, meaning you can easily take it with you on a thumb drive to use wherever it’s needed. Apart from a great deal of flexibility, portability also means that the target PC’s health status remains unaffected, because registries don’t need to be modified to ensure functionality.
On the visual side of things, features are kept in a simple interface, letting anyone get acquainted with the set of features in the blink of an eye. There are two preview panes, one which shows the original image, while the other the analyzed structure. Once recognized, all details are shown in a corresponding output pane.

Good, but far from being a pro

Unfortunately, drag and drop is not supported, so you need to use the browse dialog in order to import image files of formats like JPG, JPEG, BMP, ICO, EMF, and WMF. There’s also the possibility to save with a different encoding, but output is limited to BMP.
For better recognition, you can pay a visit to the options menu in order to enable monochrome filtration, set value of size block, and whether to use increase. However, there’s also a brightness slider, as well as a filter drop-down menu to further help reading a barcode.
Unfortunately, the application isn’t quite capable of reading many different types of code, except for Aztec barcode, and DataMatrix. This has a great impact on overall practicality, especially since you can edit code, and save the new data to file.

To end with

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Portable 2D Barcode Recognizer doesn’t come with anything new on the block, and the poor list of barcode types it can read leaves more to be desired. There are different filters and options in order to enhance reading, with portability adding to flexibility, as well as the possibility to encode more data inside an existing code.