I've heard of Metrologic, but haven't used their stuff (some of it looks pretty nice). I'ved used and liked Microscan (very much) and Symbol for barcode readers, Adept, and Cognex for machine vision, NERlight and CCS America for lighting. For the OCR project, I'll probably be using Cohu (CameraLink camera) and Matrox (frame grabber, MIL software).

But what's best depends a lot on the details. For one, some of that Metrologic stuff won't be cheap, e.g. the iQ160 is using a Dalsa line scan camera. With a line scan camera, I'd be concerned the effects of varying conveyor speed (software might be able to correct, especially if the conveyor has an encoder).

And there are other companies that do with packaging (barcodes, package sizing, etc) such as Sick Optics.

Just to re-iterate, it's very good to have local support when doing something new. Distributor pricing can be very competitive (I've done some checking versus online for some of our stuff), and when they can't handle it, they can be pretty good at putting pressure on the manufacturer (e.g. we got Siemens guys in and apologizing for the crappy software on one of their HMI's (beautiful hardware, but at the time the software and documentation was, well, a mess)). It may have helped that we have long-standing relationships.

Finally, it would be really good if he could put together a realistic test run (with plenty of realistic articles (e.g. if you expect to have crappy barcodes all over the place underneath crinkly clear plastic mailers, make packages like that) running at full speed) and see if the candidates can bring in their proposed solutions and give it a run. This is a possibility for a complete solution (e.g. Metrologic, Microscan), but probably not for a custom (camera + software).

--Tony