You will never buy, and we will never sell an SE55 Scan Engine by itself. But you may very well buy a Zebra Ring Scanner, Touch Computer or Industrial Tablet from EMP, and be very glad that this scan engine is the brain of those products.
For many years now, one of the downsides to touch computers from Zebra has been that they only have short range barcode scanners available in them. Same for industrial tablets and ring scanners. But a new scan engine was introduced last year that changed all of that. The SE55, which is a mid-range scanner, reads barcodes up to 40 feet away.
Zebra has had a long-range imager on the market for over 5 years now that is killer, the SE4850. It was a game changer when it came out, because not only could it read codes up to 70 ft. away, it could also read small codes up close, very quickly. That is because it is actually two bar code imagers in one. One for far away reads, and one for up close.
The downside to this approach is that the packaging was too big for touch computers, tablets and ring scanners. And, since it contains two barcode scanners in one package, it is also a bit of a power pig.
So warehouse application devices that could handle the size and power usage of the SE4850, like the MC9300 and TC8300, were in fact the go-to devices.
But now, different form factors can be used in the warehouse for applications that demand longer range scanning such as tablets, touch computers, and ring scanners. They give users more options for mobile computers in those applications, therefore helping the customer hone in on what’s most important for their working environment.
If you’re still curious about some of this technology, but not sure if your operations needs this type of hardware, contact us and we’ll send you demos to let you try it out.