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The Zebra FS10, FS20, FS42 and FS80 Fixed Industrial Scanners ensure reliable automated barcode capture – from compact plug-and-play devices for the workstation to high-end solutions for demanding track-and-trace applications. Selected models also offer the option to enhance barcode capture with machine vision tools for the visual inspection of production processes.
For example, DPM codes and text are captured using OCR, labels verified and components inspected to identify production defects at an early stage. The portfolio ranges from the compact FS10 for packing stations and workstations, through the network-enabled FS20 and powerful FS42 with AI processor, to the FS80 as a high-end system for high decoding performance, extended ranges and high throughput.
Technologies such as ImagePerfect support reliable capture even under changing conditions. On the FS42 and FS80, ImagePerfect+ captures up to 16 images per trigger event. The devices are easy to configure, deploy and operate using the Zebra Aurora or Zebra Aurora Focus software platforms.
A particular highlight is the Zebra FS42: equipped with a powerful AI processor and 8 GB of memory, it supports resource-intensive applications such as deep learning-based OCR without font training. Additional functionality may also be added at any time via software licences.
Order the Zebra Fixed Industrial Scanners today from your sales representative.
Zebra Technologies has informed us of a comprehensive adjustment to its pricing structure, which will take effect on the 5th of October 2026...
Zebra Technologies has informed us of a comprehensive adjustment to its pricing structure, which will take effect on the 5th of October 2026. The changes affect desktop and tabletop printers, RFID printers, general-purpose and industrial scanners, as well as selected aftermarket products from the Asset Visibility Solutions (AVS) portfolio.
As part of this adjustment, list prices across the entire AVS portfolio will be reduced, combined with revised purchasing discounts. For many products, this will result in more competitive pricing. Your demo devices will also be available at lower prices under the new pricing structure. In addition, the new prices mean that you will be able to rely less frequently on Price Concessions in your day-to-day business, allowing you to respond to customer enquiries more quickly.
With these measures, Zebra aims to provide greater pricing transparency in the market while giving you better tools to remain competitive in the face of pricing pressure and grey-market competition.
Details of the affected SKUs and the exact new prices are available on request from your sales representative. Do you have any questions? We are happy to support you with our expertise and service – simply let us know how we may best assist you!
Star has informed us of an adjustment to the list prices for their portfolio, effective from the 1st of October 2026....
Star has informed us of an adjustment to the list prices for their portfolio, effective from the 1st of October 2026.
Here is a breakdown of the relevant information for you:
- All new orders placed from the 1st of October 2026 onwards will be subject to the new list prices.
- All orders placed without project pricing and without fixed delivery date up to and including the 30th of September 2026, will be invoiced at the current list prices.
- Open orders with fixed delivery date will be recalculated as of the 1st of October 2026, and a new order confirmation will be issued.
- Projects remain valid until their expiry date.
Please note that at the time this message was published, not all details regarding the SKUs and the exact new prices were yet available.
Do you have any questions? We will be happy to assist you with our expertise and service – let us know how we can best support you!
Elo has informed us of an adjustment to their list prices for selected products in their portfolio, effective from the 5th of...
Elo has informed us of an adjustment to their list prices for selected products in their portfolio, effective from the 5th of October 2026. This adjustment results in price increases that vary depending on the product category.
Here is a breakdown of the relevant information for you:
- Android devices: 7,5% increase.
- Services, Warranties and select Software offerings: 10% increase.
- Intel devices, Displays and EloView are not affected.
What the price adjustment means for your order:
- All new orders placed from the 5th of October 2026 onwards will be subject to the new list prices.
- For orders shipped up to and including the 4th of October, the old list prices apply.
- Open orders will be recalculated as of the 5th of October 2026, and a new order confirmation will be issued.
- Project prices and quotes that do not have open orders will expire on the 4th of October 2026, and updated documents will be issued by the 22nd of September 2026.
- Project prices and quotes with open orders that are placed by the 4th of October 2026 will be extended through the 31st of December 2026. Validity will be reviewed and extended as needed until the approved quantity is fulfilled.
Please note that at the time this message was published, not all details regarding the SKUs and the exact new prices were yet available.
Details of the affected SKUs and the exact new prices are available upon request from your sales representative. Do you have any questions? We will be happy to assist you with our expertise and service – let us know how we can best support you!
Zebra has informed us of an adjustment to the list prices for a variety of products throughout their portfolio....
Zebra has informed us of an adjustment to the list prices for a variety of products throughout their portfolio. Depending on the item, this adjustment includes price increases of varying levels and will take effect from the 5th of October 2026.
Here is a breakdown of the relevant information for you:
- Barcode Scanners:
- BIOPTIC-ACC, MP72 Series, MP7XXX: 4% increase.
- Engines and Accessories (excluding SW DECODE): 5% increase.
- Mobile Computers excluding Software:
- Mobile Computer Devices (excluding Ring Scanners): 15% increase.
- All Accessories and Ring Scanners: 5% increase.
- RFID Devices:
- RFID Fixed Readers and Accessories (excluding FX RFID Software): 5% increase.
- RFID HH Readers (excluding MC33XXR, TC22R Series): 5% increase.
- MC33XXR, TC22R Series: 15% increase.
- RFID Modules, RFID OH Readers, RFID Portals, and Accessories: 5% increase.
- Printers:
- All Printers and Aftermarket Products (excluding Desktop, Tabletop, SPS Accessory, SPS Batteries, SPS Printheads, Desktop RFID, Industrial RFID, RXi Line, RZ Line): 3% increase.
- Services:
- Percentage increase varies by SKU, please ask us.
What the price adjustment means for your order:
- All new orders placed from the 5th of October 2026 onwards will be subject to the new list prices.
- All orders shipped up to and including the 4th of October 2026 will be invoiced at the current list prices.
- Open orders will be recalculated as of the 5th of October 2026, and a new order confirmation will be issued.
- All special prices, such as Deal Registrations, Demo Vouchers and promotions are subject to the price adjustment as of the 5th of October 2026.
- All approved Price Concessions remain valid until their respective expiry date.
Details of the affected SKUs and the exact new prices are available upon request from your sales representative. Do you have any questions? We will be happy to assist you with our expertise and service – let us know how we can best support you!
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Trade shows are dead. Long live dinners!
I’ll admit it: I’ve been to more trade shows than I care to remember....
I’ll admit it: I’ve been to more trade shows than I care to remember. I’ve stood at exhibition stands, lugged catalogues around, handed out pens and spent evenings in hotel bars talking about promising contacts who, come Monday, turned out to be students with a passion for collecting carrier bags. At some point, I started asking myself the question every financial controller had been asking for years: What does any of this actually achieve?
The honest answer is uncomfortable. These days, a trade show is largely an event where exhibitors visit other exhibitors. Everyone has already seen the latest products online, and the reseller you actually wanted to talk to is either at the stand next door – or hasn’t made it to the show at all because they’re short-staffed. You pay for floor space, stand construction, hotels at exhibition rates and three days with your sales team away from the office. And you come home with a stack of business cards, a third of which leave you wondering why you were given them in the first place.
Let’s use some example figures. A small stand with all the trimmings easily costs €25,000. If that results in a hundred genuine conversations, that’s €250 per conversation – and many of them last four minutes and end with: »Send me some information.« For the same money, you could invite a hundred partners to a really good dinner. Two hours, no neighbouring stand, no announcements over the PA system, no pens. Which of those two conversations will you still remember a year later? Exactly.
Now for the uncomfortable part – and it applies to me too: Trade shows aren’t completely dead. Manufacturers need the big stage, and some contacts really do happen simply because two people find themselves standing at the same coffee machine. If you disappear completely, people notice that too – just not in a good way. So I’m not saying: Stop going to trade shows. I’m saying: Stop treating a trade show as sales. It’s visibility. Sales happens somewhere else.
Where? Wherever people take the time to talk. I’ve written before that a slide with forty charts doesn’t convince me – an exhibition stand is basically the same slide, only you can walk around inside it. What does convince me is a conversation where someone listens, asks questions and remembers that your daughter has just finished her A-levels. That works a lot better around a dinner table than at a high table covered in a stretch tablecloth.
Anyone who knows us knows that we have a place for evenings like these where the food smells pretty good. But the principle works anywhere: at the restaurant around the corner, over a barbecue after a training session or at breakfast before a project kicks off. What matters isn’t the location, but the math behind it: fewer contacts, but genuine ones. Ten partners who know who you are after an evening together are worth more than two hundred business cards that end up in the recycling bin three weeks later.
So I’ll keep going to trade shows. But with lighter luggage instead of a catalogue full of products – and a short list of people I’m going to invite to dinner afterwards.
So remember: »At a trade show, you collect business cards. Around a table, you collect partners.«
Europe is not a country
At conferences, people like to talk about the »European market«, and every time they do, I think: There’s no such thing....
At conferences, people like to talk about the »European market«, and every time they do, I think: There’s no such thing. There’s a single market, a customs union and quite a lot of regulations coming out of Brussels. But there’s no European customer, no European language and – as you discover at the latest with your first rollout – no European set of regulations for POS systems either.
Take a perfectly ordinary project: Your customer is a German retailer with branches in Austria, Hungary and Romania. They want the same POS systems, the same scanners and the same printers everywhere. Sounds like one order with four delivery addresses. In reality, it’s four projects. The POS systems have to meet different fiscal requirements in each country, the keyboards need different layouts and the labels need different special characters. And when the printer stops working, the branch manager in Cluj isn’t going to call Germany. They’ll call someone who speaks Romanian – and if there’s nobody available, they won’t call at all. They’ll send an email to your customer instead.
The convenient approach is: order centrally, deliver centrally, and things will somehow work out locally. That works perfectly well – right up until the first problem. Then a German technician is on a plane to Budapest because nobody on site knows how the devices have been configured, and your margin is sitting in the seat next to them. Do the math: flight, hotel, two days of working time – €1,500 disappears very quickly for an issue that someone locally could have fixed in an hour.
That’s why we’ve chosen not to take the convenient route. Jarltech has its own sales teams in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Romania and Southeast Europe. Not just a local address with everything forwarded to Usingen, but people who know the language, the resellers and the particularities of their market. That costs more than running a central webshop with a translation button. And it’s the reason why a cross-border project with us doesn’t stop at the border.
Now for the uncomfortable part: Not everything applies everywhere. Product ranges, availability, manufacturer agreements – some things that are taken for granted in Germany don’t apply in a neighbouring country, or only apply with restrictions, because manufacturers sometimes define their sales territories differently from the way countries appear on a map. We tell you that beforehand, not afterwards. A European project where you discover in country number three that the product isn’t even authorised for distribution there isn’t a delivery problem. It’s a consulting error.
My advice: When your customer says »across Europe«, ask about countries, not quantities. Ask who will handle the installation locally, who will provide support, which language the user interface needs and whether the POS regulations have been clarified in every country. And then give us a call before you write the quote. I’ve written about the last mile before – with international projects, it isn’t one mile, but four, and each one speaks a different language.
Europe is a great idea and an excellent market. But anyone who supplies it as though it were a single country learns the expensive way what it really is: a collection of countries that all do things a little differently – and all have good reasons for doing so.
So remember: »If you deliver across Europe, you don’t need one point of contact – you need one in every language.«
Why we give you a later delivery date than the manufacturer
It happens regularly, and the mood on the phone is always the same: »The manufacturer says week 40, you say week 41 – why are you slower?« The short answer: We aren’t...
It happens regularly, and the mood on the phone is always the same: »The manufacturer says week 40, you say week 41 – why are you slower?« The short answer: We aren’t slower. We’re simply more honest about what the date actually means. I’m writing down the long answer here because it might save you an awkward email to your end customer on your next project.
A manufacturer’s delivery date is generally a dispatch date. It tells you when the goods leave the manufacturer – not when they arrive with us, and certainly not when they reach your customer. In between, there is transport, goods receipt, inspection, warehousing, order picking and the journey to you. We’re not talking about weeks, but we are talking about days – and those days determine whether your rollout starts on Monday or the Monday after.
Imagine if we simply passed the manufacturer’s date on to you. You pass it on to your end customer, who schedules staff, books the technician and informs the branches. The goods are then dispatched on time – but they haven’t arrived yet. Technically, nobody lied. In practice, twelve people are standing in a branch looking at the empty space where the pallet was supposed to be. Who pays for the technician who made the journey for nothing? Not the manufacturer. Not us. You.
That’s why we give you the date when we realistically expect to be able to hand the goods over to you. It’s later than the manufacturer’s date, sometimes frustratingly so, and it certainly won’t win any popularity contests on the phone. But it’s a date you can pass on to your customer without ending up embarrassed in the end. A distributor who gives you the earlier date isn’t selling you faster delivery. They’re selling you peace of mind – until the day the goods fail to turn up.
Now for the uncomfortable part: Our date doesn’t always hold either. Manufacturers postpone deliveries, containers are delayed, a batch fails inspection. I’ve written before about how we’ve committed to dates only for the manufacturer to throw those plans into disarray afterwards – and that still happens. The difference isn’t whether a date gets pushed back, but when you find out about it. With us, you find out as soon as we do. Not on the delivery date, when you have to ask.
And here’s a piece of advice that costs you nothing: For every project tied to a fixed date, tell us the date – not just the quantity. »We need 60 devices« is an order. »We need 60 devices, configured and ready to go on 3 November because that’s when the branch opens« is a project. With a project, we have the opportunity to order earlier, reserve stock or tell you in good time if things are going to be tight. I’ve already written about EOL with advance warning; this is the same principle on a smaller scale: The earlier we talk, the more options we have.
Ultimately, a delivery date is neither a wish nor an estimate, but a commitment that someone else bases their planning on. We’d rather give you a date you don’t like today than one that leaves you having to explain yourself three weeks from now.
So remember: »An early date that doesn’t hold is slower than a later one that does.«
