Technical Paper Overview
Improving Character Marking Quality on High-Speed Production Lines
Scan head delays, not laser power, decide character marking quality at speed.
Faster line speeds, smaller fonts, and tighter regulatory quality requirements
push marking systems harder every year. Past a certain point, characters
start to deform — ends curving upward in the jump direction, corners burning
through, edges fading where the galvos haven’t settled. The leverage point
for fixing all three usually isn’t more laser power. It’s how you tune the
system’s mark, jump, and poly delays.
This technical paper walks through the full chain of decisions that determine
marking quality and throughput at production speed: target material
absorption matching, font and design choices, laser and scan head selection,
focusing optics, and the controller delay settings that pull it all together
— including Variable Poly Delay and Velocity Compensation, two optional
features that can deliver up to 65% throughput improvement.
Key takeaways include:
- Why scan head delay settings — not laser power — usually limit character quality at high speed
- How mark, jump, and poly delays each shape a different failure mode (deformed ends, faded starts, soft corners)
- When Variable Poly Delay materially improves throughput (Mark Speed > 10,000 mm/s) and when it doesn’t
- What mirror aperture to specify for your application: 7 mm for coding, 10 mm flexible, 14 mm+ for industrial marking
A practical reference example: ti100 + MOVIA 10 mm + ScanMaster Controller, with all parameters listed. Download the full technical paper for the complete parameter recipe (mark/jump speeds, all three delay settings, duty cycle, frequency), side-by-side character-quality comparisons across delay configurations, and an evaluation framework for matching scan head specifications to your line speed — before tomorrow’s throughput goal turns into a quality problem.
