中文Here’s a quality control problem that’s quietly becoming a bigger issue as RFID labels scale up: the defect you need to find is invisible from the surface.
Traditional print inspection systems do exactly what they’re designed to do — they watch the top of the web, catch color deviations, spot smears, flag missing labels. But when the antenna and chip are embedded between layers of material, surface inspection alone can’t tell you whether the RFID inlay is properly positioned, intact, or missing entirely. The label might look perfect, and still be completely non-functional.
Erhardt+Leimer’s SmartScan product family was built to solve exactly this.
The 200% Concept: Two Eyes Instead of One
The core of SmartScan’s approach is what the company calls 200% inspection — not a marketing number, but a description of the system architecture. Instead of a single camera capturing one image stream, SmartScan captures two simultaneously, with a temporal offset between them.
The first image uses incident light — standard surface inspection that catches visible print defects: color shifts, splash marks, impurities, missing labels, and the rest of the usual suspects. The second uses transmitted light, shining through the web from beneath to reveal what the surface view can’t see: splice points on the rear side, die-cutting deviations, holes, matrix residues, and — critically for RFID applications — what’s happening inside the material layers.
Both image streams run simultaneously, each compared against golden templates. Together, they cover a defect range that no single-sensor system can match.
RFID-Specific Inspection: SmartScan RFID
The SmartScan RFID variant extends this concept into the specific challenges of RFID label production. Using transmitted light, the system can detect antenna breaks, incorrect inlay positioning, inclusions, and structural damage within the RFID layer. The system automatically detects the antenna based on contrast values and monitors whether the inlay position stays within defined tolerances.
If positioning drifts outside acceptable limits, the defect is flagged immediately — before defective labels continue downstream into converting processes where the problem becomes far more expensive to fix.
On top of structural inspection, SmartScan RFID adds variable code inspection and OCR capability. QR codes, barcodes, text, and serial numbers can be read, archived, and compared against reference data to catch duplicates or verification errors.
Production Efficiency, Not Just Quality
One of the honest critiques of advanced inspection systems is that the quality gains come with an operational cost: longer setup times, more complex configuration, operators who need specialist training just to start a job.
SmartScan addresses this with what Erhardt+Leimer describes as a “one-click operating concept,” designed to minimize setup time and reduce the training burden. For operations running multiple job types, stored job parameters and repeat-job settings are built in, which helps reduce changeover times and maintain consistency across recurring orders.
The system also supports remote maintenance and protected production data — practical considerations for facilities where uptime and data security are both on the priority list.
The Larger Argument for Integrated Inspection
As RFID adoption expands in retail, logistics, and track-and-trace applications, the label stock underneath needs to be reliable in ways that conventional inspection simply can’t verify. A label that looks perfect but has a broken antenna is worse than a visibly defective label — it passes inspection, ships, and fails in the field.
SmartScan makes the argument that print quality and RFID integrity shouldn’t be inspected separately. Combining them in a single system means one pass, one data set, and a quality record that covers the whole product — surface and structure alike.
Source: Labels & Labeling
