Patent ID: 7059525

Claim:
An optical reader comprising: a hand held housing; a light emitting assembly directing light outwardly from said optical reader; an imaging assembly disposed in said hand held housing, said imaging assembly including a solid state image sensor having a plurality of pixels, said plurality of pixels including a plurality of lines of pixels, said imaging assembly having an imaging optics assembly focusing an image of a target onto said solid state image sensor, wherein said optical reader is configured so that a frame rate of said image sensor is adjustable; an analog-to-digital converter in communication with said solid state image sensor, said analog-to-digital converter configured to convert an analog intensity value of each of a plurality of said pixels into a digital value represented by an N-bit value, where N is an integer greater than 1; a control circuit in communication with said analog-to-digital converter; and a memory in communication with said control circuit, said control circuit acquiring a set of image data elements by storing into said memory said plurality of N-bit values, said memory further storing a bar code decoding program, said control circuit configured by said bar code decoding program to decode bar code message information from a bar code represented by said plurality of N-bit values.