Back when bar codes were first introduced printers printed bar codes and manufactures built scanners to read those bar codes. Problems quickly arose when some of the bar codes were not scannable. The question was, is it the scanner or is it the bar code? This led to the first standardize method to grade a bar code for quality. The ANSI X3.182 standard was the first to address how to determine the quality of a bar code and it consisted of eight tests and a method to assign a grade of F (worst) to A (best). The overall grade for a bar code is the lowest grade of any of the eight parameters. So you can have seven tests with an “A” grade but one test with an “F”, then the overall grade is an “F”. It was determined that if a barcode received a “C” or higher then it would be up to the manufacturer of the scanner to ensure the bar code would be read, lower than a “C” and the printer needed to fix their print quality.

Since the first ANSI X3.182 standard a new international standard was developed in 2000. For linear bar codes the ISO standard is ISO15416-1. The tests are the same as the ANSI X3.182 but the grading uses a 0.0 (worst) to 4.0 (best) scale.