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UPC/EAN Global Settings
Product Reference Guide 131
UPC/EAN Global Settings
This section provides configuration settings for UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN 13 and EAN 8
symbologies, and affects all of these unless otherwise marked for each feature description.
UPC/EAN Decoding Level
Decoding Levels are used to configure a barcode symbology decoder to be very aggressive
to very conservative depending on a particular customer’s needs.
• Choosing Level 1 results in a very conservative decoder at the expense of not being
able to read poorly printed or damaged labels.
• Choosing Level 5 results in a very aggressive decoder. This aggressive behavior
allows decoding of poorly printed and damaged labels at the expense of increasing
the likelihood of decoding errors.
• Choosing Level 3, which is the default setting, allows the majority of product
labels to be decoded.
There are many factors that determine when to change the decoding level for a particular
symbology. These factors include spots, voids, non-uniform bar/space widths, damaged
labels, etc. that may be experienced in some barcode labels. If there are many hard to read
or damaged labels that cannot be decoded using a conservative setting, increase the de-
coding level to be more aggressive. If the majority of labels are very good quality labels,
or there is a need to decrease the possibility of a decoder error, lower the decoding level
to a more conservative level.