There is a mode titled “Hand Held Scanning – Mobile Phone” that optimizes your scanner to read bar codes from mobile phones and other LED displays.  It does this in part by flickering the LEDs.  Last week a business was having trouble reading barcodes off of his laptop so we told him to turn the feature on (by scanning the barcode).  And of course he stopped having trouble.  Note that you don’t have to have this feature on when scanning barcodes off of phones/tablets.  It just helps the cause sometimes.

I wanted to know what the impact was on scanning speed when scanning regular barcodes when this feature was turned on.  So I tested it.

The results – the Xenon 1900 is a little slower (about 15%) with this feature turned on.  That sounds like a lot but the difference in speed really isn’t noticeable.  The Xenon still blows through my scanner board.

So don’t hesitate to use this feature if the application calls for it – even if other barcodes are being scanned that aren’t on a phone or a computer screen.