POS (Point of Sale) Text Inserters
Text inserters could help stop "Retailers losing up to $1 billion every year as shoplifting and staff theft reach record levels."
Text inserters or as they are sometimes called text overlayers are devices designed to capture, analyse and insert text generated from electronic cash registers (ECR) or point-of-sale (POS) terminals on to surveillance video. When you integrate a text inserter, CCTV and cash register together, it forms a transaction surveillance system that could be very effective in reducing fraud and theft.
Depending on the model of text inserter, every transaction fed out of the cash register can be monitored and analyzed in real time. If an abnormal transaction (exception) text e.g. void, No sale, refund etc is detected the device can trigger an alarm and/or flag the detected exception text or event on the monitor screen. Transaction or exception text can be logged in the internal non-volatile memory or transferred to a remote PC for logging and viewing.
The You-Tube shown below is a good example of the value of a text inserter. At first watch it appears the last 6 items aren't scanned, but in fact they are accounted for.
Interfacing with the cash register is usually done by a RS232 connection. These RS 232 connections are usually used for the Pole displays often seen at counters. The output can be split two ways-one to the Pole display and one to the text inserter.
Features to look for in a good text inserter are:- Ability to display up to 10 lines,
- Ability to display up to 40 characters,
- Programmable text size and colour,
- Programmable background colour from black to transparent,
- Text position on screen programmable,
- Programmable scrolling speeds, pause, and screen clear timers,
- Blinking text on flagged/exception transactions e.g. void, no sale etc.
- Adjustable text alignment and compression,
- Item value comparisons e.g. less than, greater than, equal to,
- Video loss, power loss, communication loss and alarm indicators,
- Video in/out 75 ohm, 1 Vpp BNC connections,
- Simple text based programming via any serial terminal program e.g. Microsoft Hyper Terminal.
