SCANPEDIA

Glossary

SCANpedia - welcome to the SCANLAB GmbH encyclopedia.

Here you'll find explanations and definitions of key technical terms from the fields of optics, scanner technology, laser technology and laser processing.

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C

CPS

cps (characters per second) is the number of characters/symbols that can be marked in one second.

Marking characters and symbols is a standard application for laser scanners. Because the number of marked characters depends on numerous scanner parameters, a benchmark has emerged for directly comparing marking times. Here, a 1-mm tall single-line typeface is used to mark all 26 Latin letters in both upper and lowercase, as well as the 10 Arabic numerals. The elapsed time is then converted to characters per second – cps.

For setting the scanner's parameters, a tradeoff between writing quality and marking speed is necessary. SCANLAB specifies two possible variants, good quality (faster) and high quality (more precise). The two images below illustrate the differences:

CPS Writing Quality

 

At high quality, no obvious discrepancies should appear, whereas good quality allows minor anomalies such as oscillation and corner-rounding.

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