Imaging Solutions - Market Overview

Imaging vendors’ experienced strong growth in 2010 as end-users loosened their purse strings to re-invest in AutoID solutions – suppliers derived more than $417 million via sales of Linear and 2D Imagers, corresponding to a year-over-year growth of over 29%. End-user enterprises across vertical market segments (Retail and Transportation, in particular) have been allocating a greater percentage of their technology budgets toward investments in imaging solutions due to rapidly declining prices, proven ROI, improved performance and an increasing number of applications that extend barcode platforms such as signature capture, auto-forms population, age verification, mobile marketing, track-and-trace, etc. 

While increased adoption of PDF417 in logistics operations and GS1 DataBar at the grocery POS and health care, will continue to spur demand for linear imagers in the near-term, customers will increasingly turn to 2D imagers for their image capture capability and native support for more barcode symbologies. Not only is the price of these 2D devices becoming more competitive (and less cost-prohibitive), they also offer benefits such as omni-directional scanning, no moving parts (less fragile), enhanced ability to read damaged barcodes, 1D & 2D decoding and image capture.  Price is not as big a factor for businesses if they are able to future-proof and extend existing platforms.

Imager vendors are benefiting greatly from growing interest in & proliferation of 2D barcodes and are increasingly collaborating with software developers to build applications that cater to specific requirements of deploying organizations across a variety of vertical markets. VDC expects continued investment in this technology solution – the global market for Linear and 2D Imagers is slated to grow to $679.1 million by 2015 – while value-added support services help vendors differentiate their offerings in an otherwise highly commoditized marketplace.