Taking a Closer Look at Microsoft Tag

Microsoft recently took the wraps off a new barcoding standard. The new system is called Tags and uses triangles arranged in a 5 x 10 grid with 4 different colors to produce a high capacity color barcode. What makes this new system better, or worse, than regular barcodes, QR Codes, or any of the other scanning systems already being used?

There are a couple significant advantages to this new system. Whether or not this is enough for the world to switch and start using Microsoft’s Tags has yet to be seen.

The fist big difference that you will notice is the use of color on this code. There are 4 colors – Black, Pink, Blue, and Yellow. The use of color means that the camera can pick out the image in poor conditions and still correctly determine the code. It doesn’t matter if it’s poor lighting or a blurry image, the camera can still decipher the code. As well, the use of color means that storing 1 byte (or 8 bits) requires just 4 symbols. By comparison, QR Code requires 8 symbols to store the same amount of data.

Typical barcodes and QR codes are black with a white background providing easy contrast for scanning. With the Tag solution, the black background followed by a thin 2 pixel wide contrasting boarder is required for the camera to successfully pickup the image and process it. I tested this with a white, yellow, and black boarder. The black border would not allow the camera to correctly frame the tag and thus not process it. Both yellow and white worked without any problems. [ ..Read More.. ]