Very much with Jason on recognizability. Interesting too about thinking about how much data can be encoded.
I looked up a brief comparison which describes differences in storage and error checking. May be of interest:
* https://www.laserax.com/blog/data-matrix-vs-qr-codes
Personally, I didn't know about data matrix at all before this thread! Now I do I can see I have a letter on my desk with both a QR code and a data matrix! I am not sure what the data matrix is for, but given its placement I think it is used by the issuer to help routing at Deutsche Post. The QR code is the user-facing code, and allows me to pay the invoice via my banking app.
There's definitely something around recognizability that's useful about QR codes. You can also use some of the redundancy to include a pixel-art logo of your organization. QR codes are also going to work on modern phones out of the box and there are some decent libraries, for example, in Python that can help you to start writing those, and then with your phone you can read them pretty quickly.
Culturally, I have had discussions with colleagues about QR codes and I personally thought their time had been and gone pretty quickly. Since the pandemic however there seems to be a renewed interest in them, especially for encoding URLs at places like restaurants to reduce surface transmission, e.g. by touching menus, and it seems like a largely positive outcome (if you have a phone with internet service and a camera). It suggests they might not disappear any time soon.
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