Process Date: March 2004

Many industries, especially pharmaceutical and medical firms, are moving to clearly identify and track their products using familiar barcodes or 2D codes. Even plain text is now marked, or in some cases, molded into products and read using optical character verification (OCV) vision tools. These automated systems can be integrated throughout the product path from the manufacturing floor to pick and pack machinery in the manufacturers warehouse to the end-users shelf.

The photo shows an easily readable, engraved mark created with an FH Series marking head fitted using a 125 mm focusing lens. The 125 mm lens provides a 180-micron (0.007”) diameter spot with a 3 mm (0.118”) depth of focus. The text was created in WinMark Pro using an outlined TrueType^® font (Arial) set to a Text Height of 0.1427”, a mark Velocity of 15 inches per second, and a Resolution of 300. Total cycle time was 0.16 seconds. Cycle time was further reduced to only 0.11 seconds after changing from a TrueType font to one of WinMark Pro’s twelve built-in stroke fonts.

These plastic vial caps demonstrate the ability of SYNRAD CO₂ lasers to mark legible human-readable and machine-readable text on a variety of surfaces.