Patent ID: 7407105

Claim:
A method for scanning a bar code with a bar code scanner having a three-dimensional (3D) field-of-view encompassing a bar code, comprising: illuminating a bar code with an illumination source having a lighting wavelength and a thin, bright lighting path produced by moving a beam of light; embedding said lighting path in a first 3D volume of view of the bar code; passing backscattered light from the bar code through a filter centered on the lighting wavelength; sensing the light backscattered from the bar code by pixels of an array of pixels illuminated by the backscattered light, each illuminated pixel having a respective pixel height and a respective pixel width; artificially reducing the respective pixel height of illuminated pixels in the pixel array to a respective effective pixel height of m*w, where m is the magnification of a lens in a scanner and w is the thickness of the lighting path; and decoding the bar code.