Royal Mail have been doing their best to make every online retailer in the country aware of their new 2D barcodes due to come into effect from the 16th of October this year.
As part of their awareness campaign, Royal Mail have sent out thousands of reminder postcards, one of which was handed to Tamebay reader Adrian by his Postie as his parcels were collected for despatch.
There’s a URL on the post card, but rather than manually type it in, Adrian decided to scan the QR code printed on the bar code. We’ve tried to scan it too but it doesn’t appear to be a real QR code.
Adrian says “You might imagine the QR code that is printed on both the back and front of the card would actually work, sending anyone tech savvy to the page on their device”. Perhaps not quite the best advertisement for new barcoded postal parcels… so to save you typing in the URL if you got a post card you can simply click “royalmail.com/barcodeready“
3 Responses
Its not actually a QR code as such. What is displayed on the card is a sample of 2D barcode. Hence it the QR link software cannot recognize it.
Thanks Fedor, that makes sense now 🙂
It’s not a QR code, it’s a data matrix. A lot of QR code scanners won’t scan data matrices.
But having just said that, it’s not even a data matrix. The data regions are missing the top and right hand finders (should be alternating 0 and 1 bits). You can also see that each data region is just a rotated version of each other.
I think a graphic designer generated a pixelated noise pattern, rotated it a couple times, and then drew solid lines over it to make it looks like a data matrix.