Characteristics of a QR Code

What is the Full Form of the QR Code?

QR code stands for Quick Response Code. They contain information in encoded form. Since QR codes allow one to access information both horizontally and vertically, they are faster than the traditional bar codes. This is essentially why they are called ‘Quick Response‘ codes. QR codes contain data related to an item or act as a tracker or locator to point to a particular website or application. The encodings that are often used in a QR code are numeric, alphanumeric, byte, and Kanji....

History of QR Code

The 1960s, with a huge spark in business activities, was the beginning of economic growth in Japan. Not only the variety and quantity of commodities increased but it also increased the number of customers. However, this rapid growth did not match the old ways of checking out used at stores at that time. Typing the prices of products manually was not only a problem for cashiers, but it also slowed down the entire process.  Thus, there was a need for something that could do the task of reading and writing prices automatically. That is when barcodes came into existence. Needless to say, barcodes were used to scan the price of an item using a scanner, and the price was automatically updated in the list.  Barcodes are now used at almost every outlet and mall to scan objects, feed the price into the computer and generate the bill in seconds. However, the information they can store is very limited. That is when Denso, the company behind the production of QR codes, was contacted to ask if they could do something to increase the amount of information these barcodes can store. And thus, the process of developing QR codes, with a much higher range and variety of data storage, began.  The development of this 2-Dimensional QR code was undertaken by a team of only two people, Masahiro Hara being one of them. Although they knew that by adding information in 2-directions, the storage capacity would increase, keeping it fast was still a challenge.  However, soon, the idea to add some extra information to speed up the process came into being. This extra information was stored in no other place than the 3 square eyes you see on a QR code.  But another important thing to be kept in mind was the uniqueness of design. For this, a lot of materials were analyzed, and it was found that the ratio of 1:1:3:1:1 was the least used ratio of black and white.  Afterward, it was in 1994, that Denso Wave released the QR code. At first, the QR code was used by the auto industry for managing their products and soon, when Denso Wave made the QR codes free to use, they became popular all over the world.  It was in 2002 that even the countrymen of Japan were using the QR code using mobile phones and with QR codes being an integral part of businesses today, the rest is history....

Types of QR Codes

There are two types of QR codes depending on the way they store information, namely static QR codes and dynamic QR codes....

Characteristics of a QR Code

A QR code is very versatile and is found useful in a number of places owing to its unique features. These include:...

Uses of a QR Code

Here are some broad examples where a QR code can be used:...

Advantages of QR Code

A QR code offers various advantages over traditional bar codes and other forms of sharing information as text. Here are some of them:...

Disadvantages of QR Code

QR codes have evolved enormously over the years but there is still some room for improvement. Here are some places where QR codes lose their cool:...